[icedchai]

I do. It started up pretty quick. The hardware requirements for a "good" system were drastically different. A decent Windows 3.11 system had 16 megs of RAM... Windows XP needed at least 256 (maybe 512??). XP seemed like a pig when it first came out. Not as bad as Vista though...

[jeffbee]

16MB for a WfW 3.11 machine was a hell of a lot at the time 3.11 was launched. Most PCs in the installed base would have had 3-4MB. New systems in 1993 were coming with 4-8MB.

[icedchai]

Yes, I agree! I did say "decent"... I remember getting a 486 in mid 1994 and it had 8 megs. My earlier 386SX box had 4, if I recall. 16 would've been higher end for sure.

[M95D]

I ran Win310 on a Am496DX4 (100MHz) with 4MB FPM memory. I don't remember ever complaining it was slow.

The first time I remember complaining something was slow was Win98 start menu. Win95 kept it all in memory. Win98 read all the .lnk files every time the user clicked Start. First opening was atrociously slow because the files were not in cache. It was something like 2-3 seconds delay, while Win95 was instantaneous.

[icedchai]

Yep, Win98 definitely seemed sluggish... Win95, on the other hand, was basically targeting the same hardware requirements as Win 3.x. By the time Win 98 came out, we were well into the Pentium II era. Systems with 64 - 128 megs of RAM were becoming common.

I worked at a "startup" in the 98 to 99 (I put that in quotes since it was actually a subsidiary of a mid-sized corp pretending to be a startup.) The requirements for our app was Windows 98 with 64 megs of RAM minimum. We had a bunch of systems like that in our test lab and they basically were barely adequate. As developers, we were running NT 4 with 128 megs RAM on Xeon desktops. Those were pretty snappy boxes.