I have a Micron Pentium-1 P-166 computer with 64mb ram (upgraded from 32 mb), running Windows-95.
Before the increase in ram, could not run Avast.
Was initially running AVG - but could no longer run it after it came up with its new version (still met the minimum requirements, but my computer I guess could not cope with the increased "bloat" factor).
Had to switch to AntiVir - ran fine, till it also came up with a new version, about a month ago - Win 95 no longer supported.
So switched to Avast - wouldn't run - doubled my ram from 32 to 64mb - Avast runs quite nicely
- resident protection, updates, though takes hours to scan (on demand ) a 2Gb hard-drive.
The options for us people with older computers, operating systems are becoming less and less :'(
If Avast decides to become more "bloated", or drop support for Win95, the last option left for me is F-Prot for DOS:
http://www.f-prot.com/products/home_use/dos/Maybe F-Prot is also an option you can try, otherwise I agree with the post above, maybe increasing your ram might work (though maybe it's not necessary to go to 256mb).