> This would result in an airplane level of whirring while it used maybe a few GB of memory and hard drive storage to boot up Windows 95.

In those days, RAM was measured in megabytes, not gigabytes. My first Windows 95 PC had a grand total of 16 MB of RAM and a 1.6 GB hard drive.

It ran pretty well from what I recall.

Yes. There was no 'GB of memory' in that day.