leileilol wrote:

If a newer video card is required for Flash to display an accelerated surface, then Adobe is doing something horribly, horribly wrong.

And Adobe doing things terribly wrong would surprise you why?

I've got a 2nd generation netbook. 1.6GHz Atom, 1GB RAM, Intel graphics. Full-screen Youtube video is choppy but anything less is fine.

leileilol wrote:

Win95C'd Pentium II 266MHz w/ Seamonkey 1.x, although the cpu requirement can be bumped down to Pentium 133MHz (WITH CACHE THAT IS)

This is relevant to my interests.

I have recently dug up a Thinkpad 760XD (P1MMX @166, 512K cache, 104MB RAM.) and would like to make it a semi-mobile machine for using old versions office, and (hopefully) basic web browsing. Along with the perks of having a 12" laptop that also has a capture card.

Do you think such would suffice with such an early revision of Seamonkey, and Win95?

I'm not really sure where this idea of using Seamonkey 1.x is coming from, as that's a rather ancient browser at this point. Something like Qupzilla or possibly K-Meleon would be a much better idea.

Jorpho wrote:

I'm not really sure where this idea of using Seamonkey 1.x is coming from, as that's a rather ancient browser at this point. Something like Qupzilla or possibly K-Meleon would be a much better idea.

That's a fair point, on that Thinkpad though, in my experiments using VMs, I tend to run into the issue that the modern web, and even 'light' browsers seem to easily consume that 104MB of RAM.

Jorpho wrote:

I'm not really sure where this idea of using Seamonkey 1.x is coming from, as that's a rather ancient browser at this point. Something like Qupzilla or possibly K-Meleon would be a much better idea.

I booted up my PIII-550 a year or two ago to image some old 5.25" floppies, and tried to find a web browser that wasn't horribly out of date that would still run on Win98SE. The best I could find at the time was Opera, and even they have probably dropped support by now.

HunterZ wrote:

I booted up my PIII-550 a year or two ago to image some old 5.25" floppies, and tried to find a web browser that wasn't horribly out of date that would still run on Win98SE. The best I could find at the time was Opera, and even they have probably dropped support by now.

you can still use almost the latest opera and flashplayer on win98se with kernelex installed

Kernelex sounds familiar. I may have had to install that at the time.

robertmo wrote:

you can still use almost the latest opera and flashplayer on win98se with kernelex installed

You can't use Opera 12 with KernelEx. I tried.

the latest working are:

Opera 11.64 build 1403
FlashPlayer 11.1.102.62

BTW I am still waiting for opera with gfx support cause more and more sites use it and are too slow without that. Too bad even opera's find function highlights in that mode which is just crazy...

GFX support? What do you mean?

It was just recently announced that Opera will be dropping its proprietary rendering engine (Presto) and switching to Webkit (the same engine used by Chrome, Safari, Qupzilla, and many other browsers), so there are big changes afoot.

GPU hardware acceleration

They were working on it so long (wanted to make whole opera (not just pages like others) into gpu). And they abandoned that work now and started a new one. That doesn't mean we can expect anything soon i guess 😉

K-Meleon runs rather slow on a PII. Facebook takes a good minute to load and even Google searches will hang for a bit.

robertmo wrote:

GPU hardware acceleration

I never saw the need for that in a browser, and I think it's one of the hyped up bullshit things that make a browser slower. One of the reasons why I mentioned Seamonkey 1.x is because the older gecko it uses was a bit faster for older machines than the one in 2.0 and Firefox 3.0 and onward and DIDN'T have the Direct3D acceleration, which would be murder on a 'minimum rig' anyway.

K-Meleon? No thanks. Button clutter, crash heavy, slow "fast" browser.

Jorpho wrote:

It was just recently announced that Opera will be dropping its proprietary rendering engine (Presto) and switching to Webkit (the same engine used by Chrome, Safari, Qupzilla, and many other browsers), so there are big changes afoot.

So Opera is just going to become YetAnotherSlowWebkitBrowser?

@QlShdR
I like your translation of Sea Monkey in your native language. It means we are neighbors :p
Instead of VIZ I prefer SOR or PALINKA. Or my favourite, Tokay Red.

HunterZ wrote:

The problem was that the CPU itself was not powerful enough to do it, and GPU-accelerated decoding had not been realized yet.

That's what software HD-decoders are for. Arguably the best is CoreAVC Professional. Really low CPU-usage and the latest release is perfectly fine with Hi10p as well. It's my Holy Grail (with The KMPlayer) of some sort. Hard-core anime-collector here, so I had my adventures with players and codecs. : )

HunterZ wrote:

or a Raspberry Pi if you can find another $5 in coins under your couch cushions

Raspberry Pi is very nice indeed, maybe I'll get one someday, becuase it's really capable to do basic tasks with ridiculously low power consumption in a tiny case.

However, that 25 $ version (Model A) has no ethernet port, only one USB and 256 MB RAM. The main problem is ethernet, so need to buy the Model B, which is 35$ and then buy an extra SD card, a power supply (not inculded in price), even a case. This is 60-80 $ already.

No PS/2 and only 2 USBs, so I need an additional powered USB hub to connect external HDDs, pendrives, ODDs, etc.

With this, we're at roughly a hundred bucks and while it's definitely worth it, it's well above my current budget for this.

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RacoonRider wrote:

Haven't you considered a first generation Atom (N270) netbook? Those become cheaper and cheaper, I've already seen some in normal condition for 130-150 USD.

130-150 $ is 110-120 $ more than my budget for this. : )

But there's even cheaper notebooks with Core Duo, X3100 and 1 GB RAM, but those stuff still costs 100-120$ at best.

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feipoa wrote:

Btw, even a Cyrix 5x86-133 can listen to variable bitrate mp3s w/out quality reduction. Web-based applications aside, the choice of WinNT 4.0 will allow for the most minimum CPU selection for the other items on your list.

I know that 5x86-133 is good enough for *.mp3 but I'm a bit worried over the other tasks. Can, for example DivX work with an MPEG card?

I never used NT 4.0 before, how's its compatibility with XP / W7 x64? I mean shared folders via router.

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fillosaurus wrote:

I like your translation of Sea Monkey in your native language. It means we are neighbors :p
Instead of VIZ I prefer SOR or PALINKA. Or my favourite, Tokay Red.

We're not too far away from each other. : P

If it's alcohol, then Bacardi Breezer and gin-tonic for me.
Otherwise, I hate the flavour, so I prefer VÍZ over SÖR, PÁLNIKA or BOR. : )

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AdBlock is nice, but I'm not sure if I can you use it with old browsers on an old machine.

Also, isn't there a way to reduce the Flash-bloat except AdBlock?

leileilol wrote:

robertmo wrote:

GPU hardware acceleration

I never saw the need for that in a browser, and I think it's one of the hyped up bullshit things that make a browser slower.

Not sure whether you mean that pages don't have to be designed for that or that there are no pages that use it.

QlShdR wrote:

I know that 5x86-133 is good enough for *.mp3 but I'm a bit worried over the other tasks. Can, for example DivX work with an MPEG card?

I never used NT 4.0 before, how's its compatibility with XP / W7? I mean shared folders via router.

I have only a tried it with DVD-decoder card, which worked fine. I have not had any issues with networking w/XP. I have not tried Win7.

@QlShdR
Best is BORVÍZ :p

leileilol wrote:

So Opera is just going to become YetAnotherSlowWebkitBrowser?

Yeah, I scratched my head when I saw that announcement. I don't see how Opera's browser UI or whatever other bells/whistles it has could possibly be compelling enough to be worth the bother if it's just going to use a run-of-the-mill rendering engine. May as well use Chrome at that point (not that I'm a Chrome fanboy either).