Major major dirty little secret, something copied right out of Apple's playbook. Recent releases of Windows have a built in check in the SETUP program to prevent you from installing Windows on certain low end computers. Not because Windows won't run on those machines, but because Microsoft's marketing department has decided that Microsoft won't support those machines.
Windows 98 in particular raised the bar considerably, requiring a minimum of a 66 MHz 486 in order to install. Yes Windows 95 easily installed on 16, 20, 25, 33, and 50 MHz machines and even on older 386 machines. So why the sudden increase in hardware requirements?
Similarly, Windows Millennium now raises the bar even further, requiring no less than a 150 MHz Pentium based system. This is ridiculous! Windows 95, 98, and Millennium are all essentially the same operating system with the same kernel, and yet the requirements have been raised by a factor of 10. Why?
Apple pulled this same stunt with Mac OS 8, artificially raising the requirements to that of a 68040 based Mac, even through Mac OS 8 runs just fine on 68030 based machines! And with Mac OS X again, they're pulling the same stunt, claiming that a G3 or G4 processor is required, even though we've received reports from users running the Mac OS X beta just fine on 604 based systems. With Apple I can understand - they want to sell you the latest and greatest hardware and want to discourage people from using older machines.
But Microsoft is not a hardware company and doesn't make computers, so what is their motivation? As best as I can tell, it's strictly for product support reasons. They don't want to bother with those people running older slower machines because, gee, you might call up and complain that Windows is too slow!
I have heard that parts of the Windows 98 system depend on the a floating point co-processor being present and all Intel processors running at 66 MHz or faster are guaranteed to have an FPU present. This makes sense. But most 33 and 50 MHz 486 chips also have an FPU.
Fortunately, Microsoft does provide an override, documented vaguely in some beta releases of Windows. If when you run SETUP, you type "SETUP /nm" (the nm standing for No Minimum), it will not run the hardware check. It is using this switch that I've successfully installed Windows 98 and Windows 98 Second Edition on a number of 33 MHz 486 systems (yes, on my good old Dell machines as well) with no problems. And speed compared to Windows 95 isn't too bad, it's about the same.
With Millennium, I've installed it on a 16 megabyte 100 MHz Pentium system and it works just fine. That shoots down any rumors about Millennium requiring MMX technology (which does not exist in processors slower than 150 MHz) and again, as far as I can tell, it's mainly to shut up those customers who might complain about speed.
Millennium IS very slow at first, but once you disable the System Restore "feature", and once you limit the size of the disk cache, performance is only slightly worse on the 16 megabyte system than compared to using Windows 98.
When I get the chance I will test Millennium on a 486 to see if there are any Pentium specific dependencies. I'd love to hear from anyone that's already tried it.
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