24 Dec
1998
24 Dec
'98
2:45 a.m.
<> I agree. I've got a friend who tried
their 386 with Windows 95... he
<> said it took him an hour and a half to open Word for Windows 95...
<> then he gave up... and it even had 15MB RAM!
I don't.
I ran w95 on a 386dx/40 with cache 16mb ram and a 1.2gig partitioned as
a pair of disks just last week and a backup for a croaked pentium board.
It was slow but not hours. It was also running office97 as that was on
the drive too. A 486DX2/50 was much better.
I did however do some major tuning tricks on the cmos and things like
windows swap drive. Some of those old boards if you take the cmos defaults
you get a very pokey system often 1/3 the performance or worse.
Allison
The biggest thing you mention is CACHE. Try it on a 386 without cache.
I'm amazed how much cache improves the performance of a 486 or Pentium.
I ran a Cyrix 586/133 without internal and external cache and it ran
Unix slower than a 386SX/25.
I shouldn't be surprised at this, since the speedup was noticeable even
with PDP 11/34A's... which had a small but effective optional cache.
Memory bandwidth is important.
The PDP 11/70's cache made it impressive -- but the direct Massbus data
path to memory was probably more important in it's performance over
the 11/45 and 11/55.
If I remember correctly:
The 11/70's Unibus performance was less than spectacular and it even
was out performed by some other 11's in that area.
Bill