Hello Roy,

 RM> I'm no expert on this opsys, except to note that on a 486/33 with
 RM> 8M ram it runs like a dead dog.

I'm not suprised.  It needs 14MB to load (according to the MS
resource kit), so with only 7MB of RAM (the bottom 1 isn't used
for Win) it'll be waddling in a swapfile even to do the most
basic things.

Click the Start button and watch the HDD light flicker :)

 RM> That said, I had fun on the one W95 pc in the workshop today. I
 RM> tried to start PCAnywhere95 (pain in neck, but that's another
 RM> story)

On an 8 meg PC?  ROFL!

 RM>  and was told that one of its DLLs was missing. So I fired up
 RM> Explorer (son of that useless fossil File Manager) to look for it.

Using a real file manager, like Xtree, will find it in 3 seconds
if it's anywhere on the HDD.

 RM> Clicking on a subdir normally results in a file list appearing in
 RM> less than a second. Clicking on PCA's subdir gave a file list, but
 RM> each file took about six seconds to appear, the whole list took
 RM> several minutes, much disk thrashing happening the whole time.

How big did WIN386.SWP get?  Mark up that figure by 30 - 50%,
and add that much RAM.  That might leave enough over for a bit
of drive caching.

 RM> I ran PCA's Uninstall program. It suffered from the same slow
 RM> disease, and took 25 minutes to run.

Yeah.  A 12 millisecond hard drive is no substitute for 60
nanosecond RAM, and it shows...

 RM> I then ran

And from then your message hit the bit bucket.

If you want to stick with 8M RAM, stick with Win 3.x.

I'm using '95 here (486DX) - it was usable with 16MB, and
with 24MB ran all but things like M$ Office OK.

With 32MB everything seems to run smoothly enough here.

32 meg of RAM will probably cost you a tad under $300.

Regards,
Chris.


--- GoldED