Okay this ani't about cpu but I have made a list on what you need to make certian versions of windows fly on hardware with a certian amount of ram I did not have time for cpu speed but the minum requirements are not what you want to use.
windows 3.11 and Ms-dos 6.22 16-24MB Ram
Windows 95 osr 2.5 32MB RAM use 64MB if you have the spare ram it is a minor speed increase
Windows 98SE 128MB Ram huge optimistation 96MB Ram little optimisation 64mb little as well 32mb optimsiation is a must 16mb don't even think about it
WindowsME 128mb ram more If you need sercirity software
Windows NT4 96MB 128 If you want to run lots of things at once.
Windows 2000 256MB
Windows XP 256MB Ram basic 512MB Advanced 1024MB Extream.

Win 3.1 & DOS work perfectly on 4 MB of RAM.
Win95 will work on 4, but 8 is a big leap in its speed.
Win98SE runs fast on 128 MB... BUT 256 is even better.

O okay but windows 98 only needs 128mb to be fast 256mb is for powerusers and they would run win2000 or xp.

Neh. 2K is notorious for its compatibility problems, and XP would turtle.
256 MB is good when you are doing a few things at once, for example running a P2P client (eMule in my case) and several browser windows.

Calculation is easy:

more memory = less pagefile use = faster performance

MS-DOS and Win311 / Wfw3.11 all work fine with 32MB/64MB.

Windows XP works best with 2GB of RAM, Windows Vista 2-3GB

AFAIK Win XP is not able to use use more than 1 GB of RAM.
At least so I was told so... :unsure:

Windows XP can use far more than 1GB

Oh, really?
My workmate told me that everything above 1GB RAM would slow XP down because of some sort of memory management error...
He read that in a IT-news page. Have you heard something like that? :huh:

XP has a hard limit of 4GB which is a hardware limitation as well as a software one. 32 bit processors simply cannot address more than 4GB (2^32 bits) and while I believe there are some Intel-specific extensions to deal with enlarging the address space, I double checked the Microsoft documentation of the issue and all 32b versions of Windows are still subject to this limit.

While the address size increases considerably with 64 bit processors (to the tune of 18 exabytes), I'm fairly certain that 64b Windows imposes a far lower software-level limit.

Still, this seems a ^bit^ exagerated... I've been running XP on systems with as low as 256mb ram. It ran, though a little slow. It's not the OS that consumes the large amounts of memory, it's your applications. If you're running Photoshop CS2 or 3dsMax on your XP machine you're in need of more RAM. If you're only running Word and emailing, XP will run fast enough on 256mb ram (I've got a little Dell Latitude CPt set up just for this and it works okay).

I tend to run a lot of programs at once :P

Same on my current sys shared memory takes 32mb for graphics making it 224mb I use XP on. Fine for most stuff like internet email and word. But I am gonna add more.

This is correct.

I worked on latop with 2GB of memory, and enables you work very fast with large files (for example movies) as it does not have to use pagefile all the time.

I always new one day I would not have use for a 32bit processor.

Some days ago I would have sweared that 64 Mb (which is what I've got :( ) was grossly insufficient for Windows 98SE (which is what I've got), but now I'm not so sure. The reason is that the most RAM-consuming task I perform is Internet browsing, and until recently (actually yesterday) I had only used MS IExplorer and Firefox, and now I'm using Opera.

Well I don't know whether Opera is better than other browsers, I guess it depends on your situation. But if you're strained for resources, especially RAM (maybe not a common situation but mine for instance), it is the best one indeed, at least MS IExplorer and Firefox don't quite manage or care about freeing the memory they have been occupying and the system shrinks over time, which may lead to crashes. And I do support Opera's claim about being the fastest browser, it may depend on the site but the Abandonia forums are a very good example: with Firefox this pages loaded very slowly, and I thought that it was about the pages not about the browser, but now with Opera they load smooth as silk.

Regarding optimization, well I've got nearly no idea about that, but I try to have as few programs as possible residing in memory or even installed, and this is easy if you care about it.

I have a lot of programs running in the background like a firewall and antivirus.

I use antivirus and firewall as well, but those (the ones I use) seem to use very little memory compared to a web browser. And now that I'm using Opera I can navigate far better and faster than with Firefox, even with antivirus and firewall.

Mine use alot.But I like them and do not care to much about changing them.

I now have 768mb ram with 64mb of that total for onboard graphics.

This is correct.

I worked on latop with 2GB of memory, and enables you work very fast with large files (for example movies) as it does not have to use pagefile all the time. [/b][/quote]
There are workarounds for this. The 8088 was only a sixteen bit processor, but it could address twenty-four bit address spaces using paged memory management. One of the CPU's system registers was eight bits long and stored the page number of the memory address, and all memory operations used the contents of the page register as the first eight bits of the twenty-four bit address. The M68000 family must also have had this feature, as my Macintosh had a megabyte of RAM (twenty bits worth of address space), but only a sixteen bit CPU.

You can have more address lines than the word size, but it complicates things, and slows things down. Now word sizes are at the point where there is no need for using memory offsets to get larger address spaces.

It is not just the operating system that determines how much memory you need. More is usually better, as one of the common computer bugs are memory leaks. these are snippets of code that grab dynamically allocatable memory, but never give it back, even after it is finished with it. The amount of memory available goes down, and the swap file gets bigger; until, the computer can only run by thrashing the disk. This is why it is a good idea to reboot your system periodically to keep it running fast for the rest of the time.

...

<!--QuoteBegin-rlbell
These are snippets of code that grab dynamically allocatable memory, but never give it back, even after it is finished with it.* The amount of memory available goes down, and the swap file gets bigger; until, the computer can only run by thrashing the disk.* This is why it is a good idea to reboot your system periodically to keep it running fast for the rest of the time.[/quote]
Virtual memory essentially solves this problem as, when the process is killed, the virtual address space is freed and all associated memory freed. Try running a test program which malloc()s a lot of memory but doesn't free it, then kill it -- the allocated memory will be freed by the OS.

Yeah I notice that with vmware which I am trialing.

This thread's a bit old, but the question is related...

How much RAM can Windows 98 SE handle, exactly?

=P

512MB without editing some sys files I forgot which ones anyway to push it past you need to edit sys files.

it was.. written in my post?

OK sorry.

i just get kinda pissed becouse in most of your posts dont say anything new, just only repeat what did others say

I am just trying to help :blink: .

nevermind -_-

Ok

One word posts? What's the world coming to LOL

I only had one word to say.