Windows 9x feels snappy and responsive -- on a VM on modern hardware. On the hardware of the day... yeah, it chugged. You needed about 16 MiB of RAM and a graphics accelerator for acceptable performance in 1995, and that was quite a beefy system for that year.
I got the wrong ram (64mb instead of 16) and will say it ran like a dream on a 5x86-133 with a cache module. NT4 ran really well on there as well for the time. OS/2 didn't behave quite right, after NT4 I never really looked back. Kept a 9x partition for games only.
