486 build ramblings

[Casey]

You may find your target audience for such a setup is 1.



Stacker can't work miracles. It's tuned for speed, not efficiency, so it will do 1.5x on executables at best and that's not going to be enough to fit everything on there. Also, you can't install with compression, you can only apply it afterwards. So this is extremely unlikely to work.

If you want a period-correct challenge, try the challenge I did in 1995: Install Windows 95 on a system that meets the bare requirements: A 386sx-16 with 4MB of RAM. Can you install it via floppies? Yes. In less than a day? And when finished, have it boot in less than 20 minutes? And launch programs in less than 5 minutes? Well, those are the real challenges.

I was running a 486dx2-66 with 4 megs of ram at that time. Actually bought a CD-ROM drive (Creative Labs 2X, woo hoo!) and 4 more megs of ram before installing 95. It ran acceptably well. I was running Desqview/386 before that. Generally it performed well, but it still ran on top of DOS, and was running up against the 640K limit, even loading as much high as I could.

Oddly enough, 95 could run NT console apps. In fact, at the time I was still a part of Fidonet, and all I had to do after the upgrade is drop the NT .exe in on top of the MS-DOS .exe.

 

[Agent Orange]

Casey good for you. I have a 486DX2-66 up and running with W95. However, with 3 other projects going at the same time I haven't had time to 'get in to it'. I have a load of apps and games from early 90's that I would like to mess with. The box has 3.5", 5.25", CDROM, Blaster, and a Logitech mouse. Standard stuff but it all still works.