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Windows 3.1 on a 286 class machine.

Caluser2000

Caluser2000

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Just to follow on from the posts from the worst installation thread about installing Windows 3.1 on a 286 class machine I'm curious has to who else gave it a crack? Some folk appear to have had an issue trying to install it on a 286 but I never did. Of course using a 386 up takes advantage of more features. In saying that Standard mode was by all accounts quicker.

For **sts and giggles about half an hour ago I dragged out my flakey ELT-286 based system with a Cirrus Logic 1meg svga card, 3.5'' fdd, 2meg EMS memory expansion card and it's Conner CP3000 41 meg hdd(drive type 17) attached a generic multi i/o card. It had been sitting for a while unused. A newer psu had to be connected as the original one wouldn't boot the system anymore. With the bios up set up correctly the machine had trouble booting the hdd. This turned out to be a faulty ribbon cable. Once that was replaced it booted nicely to the C:>. Oh joy!!

Grabbed the oem Osbourne Win 3.1 installation disks I'd bought a few decades ago, ran the setup routine and feed the disks into the 3.5" drive as requested. About 20 minutes later the install was finished. Reboot, type "win", pressed enter. Little while later Program Manager presented itself. No complaints from the installer, no mouse used. Basicly "no mess Charlie" with about 4.5 megs of hdd space used.

Doing a totally unscientific, I don't have a stop watch, GUI comparison Win3.1 loads to the "desktop" slower than Geoworks Pro but about the same a Geoworks 2.0.

I'll have hunt through some boxes out on the shed to see what apps I've got still.
 

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I used to run Windows 3.1 in Standard Mode on a stock IBM PS/2 Model 50z. It ran fine with 2MB of RAM, but it wasn't what you would call fast.

Here is some obscure trivia. The original versions of Insignia Solution's "SoftWindows" PC emulator for the Mac only supported Standard Mode for speed reasons (most software was still 16-bit and really didn't require a 386). The amount of instructions to start Windows 3.1 in 386 Enhanced Mode was nearly triple. It took them a few years to finally release a 32-bit version of that emulator.
 
I run win 3.1 on my Compaq portable II and III with 1mb and 2.5mb ram respectively. It's mostly for giggles and to say that I have done it but it's quite useable on the III. I think the fact mine have modern IDE hard disks might help their speed quite a bit though, might not think they were as fast with old MFM drives in them.
 
In mid 1994, when I was selling computers at retail, I ran into a fair number of people with high-end 286s (16-25 MHz) who ran Windows 3.1 on them. So there were people who did it.

In retrospect I don't think I blame them. Windows 95 was still a year off and it was anyone's guess what the real requirements were going to be.
 
My 12MHz GEM 286 runs Windows 3.1 quite happily under 4MB of RAM. I use it for playing some of the less as complex games for Win3x. It even has full Sound and SVGA video (1MB OTI SVGA ISA card).
 
Unknown_K said:
Any major advantages of running Win 3.0 on a 286 compared to 3.1?
Click to expand...

The major advantage for Win 3.0 would be real mode which would allow you to run any Win 1.x or Win 2.x application that hadn't been upgraded protected mode Win 3 operation. Okay, that means a few marginal and mediocre titles like the Palantir* products and some obscure pieces of shareware; nothing anyone is too likely to find these days. A handful of Win 3.0 programs went bonkers when faced with 3.1's TrueType fonts.

*Palantir had the misfortune of closing about 6 months before Windows 3 was released. A year later, many of the established DOS publishers were busy buying Windows application developers irrespective of quality but Palantir's ownership didn't manage to cash in.
 
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