On  4 Mar 98 at 0:35, Winston Pike wrote:

> I'm currently running windows 3.11 on a 486 66MHz with 20megs of
> ram and 2*200 meg HD's. I know win95 will run on a 486-33 with
> 8megs (it was a tad slow but I myself was running a 386 at the time
> so it seemed faster). My question is: Should I wait for win 98 to
> upgrade or just stick with upgrading to win 95? I've heard the 98
> is supposed to be better at the PnP and able to detect more plus
> "most" of the bugs (features) have been corrected but will it run
> on my machine?

  There are very few things that Micorsoft could do in Win98 that
would prevent it from running on a 486.  The most obvious choice
would be to depend upon MMX, but that would eliminate an awful lot of
Pentiums and Pentium Pros too, so the CPU is not really an issue.
Performance is not going to be stellar, but you knew that.

  400 MB of hard drive, though, isn't much for OS, applications, and
data to all crowd into.  It's surprising how fast a 2 GB drive will
fill up.  The only reason I would not upgrade this machine to at
least that capacity is if you do not have and cannot get an
LBA-capable BIOS for it.  There are alternatives, though, so I'd
probably go ahead anyway.

  8 MB of RAM is probably going to hurt your performance, too.  RAM
prices have been down recently (although they may have rebounded
somewhat by now), and 16 MB is likely to work much better.  The
problem here is that you should probably not invest in upgrading your
486 *unless* those upgrades will continue to be useful after a
motherboard/CPU upgrade, and SIMMs might not be.  Even if you cannot
afford such an upgrade today, you're pretty certain to want one and
should plan current purchases accordingly.

David G