Hello,
I’m trying to figure out what has changed in terms of memory requirements for various OS versions. I know that the price of memory has dropped, and that applications are probably now more efficient,. But, I’m still curious as to what the recommended mimimums were for say Windows '95 vs Window’s XP. Any help would be most appreciated.
Thanks.
Well, I ran Windows 95 on my 486 (66mhz) with 12MB RAM, and as long as there weren’t many programs running in the background, Win95 ran perfectly well. Someone will correct me here, but I believe the recommended minimum for Win95 is 16MB.
Actually, this site tells me the requirements for Win95 are much, much lower (4MB of memory, 20mhz). Oops 
Thanks for the info. This is what I thought it was (4MB), but couldn’t find anything stating this.
Thanks again…Bolthead.
More efficient? What dream world are you living in? One of the reasons we need more RAM now is the bloatware that passes for programming!
Don’t disagree with you that apps have bloated as memory prices have dropped. But that being said, as programmers have improved their techniques (example: shared Java VM’s vs. separate VM’s per instance of an app), they have become more efficient (I think).
Some versions have maximum memory limits too. XP can take quite a lot of memory though.
In my experience, real-world minimums are break down like this:
Win95: 32M
Win98: 64M
WinXP: 256M
Both of those OS’s will be pretty sluggish with only that amount of RAM installed. If you have a typical home/family machine loaded with various bells and whistles (instant messengers, etc.) I’d say the minimum comfortable levels were more like 64M for Win95, 128M for Win98 and 384-512M for XP.
I was running Win95 on a P200 machine with 32mb of RAM including such things as ICQ, whilst browing the internet. It was sluggish, but it never crashed. You just had to be patient.
It bears mentioning that Microsoft’s reccommended minimum requirements for Windows have historically been insanely optimistic. Multiply the “minimum” numbers by 4 or 8 and you’ll get a better idea of what’s needed.
I’ll believe Win95 can run with 4MB when I see it, and no sooner. Even if it can boot with so little RAM, the real question is: can it run, say, a web browser?
Windows 98 generally had lower memory requirements than Windows 95, once you cleared out the cruft. Its more efficient memory management did help, but since it had more applications running in the background by default, you had to turn them off to see large benefits.
When windows 95 came out, there was a lot of grumbling and complaining that it would not run on many of the lower end systems that were still in public use. Microsoft apparently tried to appease some of this grumbling and set the minimum requirements for Win95 to the absolute minimum required for the operating system to run. If you actually tried to use a system with only 4 MB of ram (yes, I tried it, just to see what would happen) you quickly found out that yes, it would run windows 95, and maybe a few simple applications like solitaire, but if you tried to do anything with any complexity the system did not behave well at all. The “real” requirement for windows 95 was 1 step up in processor class from what they advertised (they said it would work on a 386, but it really didn’t run well unless you had a 486)and 8 MB of ram. Microsoft “recommended” this, and if more consumers had been using 486’s at the time, it would have been a requirement.
Back in those days applications were much more efficient than they are now, because they had to be. Microsoft for a long time had a version of Microsoft Word written in C and another with the important stuff written in assembly (much harder to code in, but produces much more efficient code). They would compare the output of each program and they had to match. This gave them the ease of use and the built in protection of C (you can’t accidentally trash the stack in C, but you can easily do it in assembly) and the performance of assembly code, but at a huge development cost. Somewhere along the way they stopped doing the assembly version, which is why word runs considerably slower on later versions. But with a 2 GHz machine who cares, which is why most software today moves the balance towards faster development time rather than performance, creating software bloat.