TP750Cs vs Win95 -- WinNT - OS/2 -- linux

["Alexander J. Annala" <a.annala@ucl.ac.uk>]

Given the availability of relatively large amounts of low
cost disk storage, I am wondering how realstic it might be
to try running Win95, WinNT, OS/2, or linux in a separate
disk partition?  

A year ago my personal machine was an ancient/old/aging
386DX-33/387/8MB/650MB/ET4000/WD8003e system.  I ran DOS,
Win3.1, OS.2 2.1, 386BSD, SCO UNIX, and WinNT (beta) on it.
Most of these packages (sometimes with a little tuning ran
just fine) -- WinNT ran like a dead pig (even after tuning
-- but I had less than reasonable config for WinNT).

Now I'm portable with a TP750Cs/486SL-33/12MB/720MB system.
Disk is cheap enough I might upgrade again to 1,350MB disk.
But, memory is still pretty dear, so upgrading to 20MB RAM
is pretty unlikely for the moment.

Mostly, I run office applications (MS Office [word, excel,
powerpoint]), academic stuff (like sigmaplot, statistica,
spss, sas, bmdp, bibliographic programs, oxford english
dictionary), network applications (netscape, telnet, ftp),
and (sequencher, rasmol, swiss prot, mfold, rna draw, dna
strider), and a 68k macintosh emulator (ardi executor --
which is kinda nice because it turns my TP750Cs into a
portable color macintosh -- like having two portables in
one small package).  Sometimes I do a bit of development
or porting work (mostly trying to wedge mainframe code
into small enough pieces to fit in the personal computer
world). 

Currently I run just DOS 6.22/Win3.1.  But, I think it may
be nice to get back into a 32 bit enviroment to avoid the
constant need to segment arrays into 64K pieces to keep the
16 bit operating system happy.  OS/2 2.1 did a nice job for
me almost two years ago.  I wonder whether Win95, WinNT. or
any other system might work as well in my limited notebook
configuration?  I could just go back to OS/2 for my own use.
But it would be nice if other people could use my work --
and they mostly seem to be moving toward Win95.  WinNT may
be the recommended Win95 development environment.  But, I'm
afraid WinNT may require too much resource to be worthwhile.

Perhaps Win95 / MS C++ 4.0 would be the best compromise for
running existing programs and developing new ones.  Many of
the scientific packages I use are available for Win95/WinNT
-- and are not practical to port to Win32s.

What would you recommend?

Thanks,

Alexander J. Annala, Ph.D.
Laboratory for Molecular Pharmacology
University College London