Just got my Amiga 4000-D down from the loft..

[Karlos]

There are some tangible benefits to 3.9 over 3.0. Aside from various bug fixes, it has a slightly improved Workbench, with ARexx port (which I found very handy), asynchronous file rename/copy/delete (never did understand why that wasn't always the case), tarted up icons, better scrolling of windows and so on. You get VinceEd as an alternative shell, which is rather better than the standard shell (though I always had a soft spot for KingCON). It also comes with a TCP/IP stack out of the box (though AmiTCP 4 is better IMO) and you also get support for larger disks, which is handy these days, since finding < 4GB drives outside of a computing museum is somewhat tricky.

You'll have to add the cost of kickstart 3.1 to that though.

[Karlos]

Shouldn't be any problem. I have 3.5 and 3.9 installations using all the available space on 10 and 20GB drives.

The only proviso is that your boot partition is in the lower 4GB, since until the OS has loaded the necessary drivers, you still have an OS3.1 view of the hard disk.

Incidentally, I'm never sure why people make their Workbench partitions so large. Really, you can fully install OS3.9 in less than 30MB, including a few essential utilities. I tend to keep my OS partitions fairly small and have all additional programs, data etc on different partitions.

I also tend to set up more than one boot partition, both for testing stuff with different versions of the OS and just in case I manage to corrupt one.