Maybe a 1.4 GHz Tualatin, better something with SSE2 for Flash GPU acceleration, Win XP. I completely fail to see the point of setting up an old rig for these tasks though?

Win95C'd Pentium II 266MHz w/ Seamonkey 1.x, although the cpu requirement can be bumped down to Pentium 133MHz (WITH CACHE THAT IS)
TinyIRC for IRC, MirandaIM for instant messaging,
WinAMP (ew!) for music playback in the background,
VLC 0.8.6 for watching DivX/ XviD,
I don't do torrents, so nothing from me on that. Never had a reason to use them.

The internet used to be still very smooth and usable with IE5 on a Pentium 100MHz back in 2003.... then SWF abuse in ads became more prevlaent (like video ads), and then Flash itself had a few speed regressions (UGH FLASH 8 ), and then finally the "faster" Firefox... you'd think that hyped up HTML5 would work around the Flash performance bottlenecks too, but it doesn't.

leileilol wrote:

back in 2003

This, basically. I doubt you could even surf fecesbook with even a PII nowadays, not to mention anything that remotely has to do with Flash

d1stortion wrote:

I completely fail to see the point of setting up an old rig for these tasks though?

The reasons are quite simple:

- I like old computers
- low power consumption
- cheap
- maybe I can get a few parts completely free or for a chocolate / beer
- feeling
- feeling : )

-----------------------------------------------

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 […]
Show full quote

Win95C'd Pentium II 266MHz w/ Seamonkey 1.x, although the cpu requirement can be bumped down to Pentium 133MHz (WITH CACHE THAT IS)
TinyIRC for IRC, MirandaIM for instant messaging,
WinAMP (ew!) for music playback in the background,
VLC 0.8.6 for watching DivX/ XviD,
I don't do torrents, so nothing from me on that. Never had a reason to use them.

The internet used to be still very smooth and usable with IE5 on a Pentium 100MHz back in 2003.... then SWF abuse in ads became more prevlaent (like video ads), and then Flash itself had a few speed regressions (UGH FLASH 8 ), and then finally the "faster" Firefox... you'd think that hyped up HTML5 would work around the Flash performance bottlenecks too, but it doesn't.

Hehe, I tried Seamonkey before, and I liked it. The name of the browser is "vízimajom" :' DD on my native language which is hilarious.

I don't know about MirandaIM, but Skype would be nice, because I have a few contacts whom I talk with regularily and most of them are not the experimenting type, if you know what I mean.

What's the problem with WinAMP? Arguably the best sound (at least in the causal market - I don't know much about professional audio softwares). Without visualization plugins, I find it relatively easy on the CPU.

PII 266 is getting close to what I had in mind originally. But why Win95 and not 98 or 2000? Only because of the "minimum OS" I mentioned in the opening post or there're other reasons as well?

P133 in some TX board would be awesome. Disabling ads and such in the browser can help to boost the performance immensely, right? Maybe not YouTube with this, but the other tasks should be fine. : S
Correct me, if I'm wrong.

Minimum OS that is. Some people are a tad spoiled with 98se and forget that 95C is almost as capable too 😀 of course you could use Win98SE with 98lite to regain some speed with the old 95 shell.

Also if you don't mind a NTFS partition, you could even stretch down to NT 3.51 as a minimum OS. It also makes me wonder if there's a way to use NT 3.51 with FAT32 using certain Windows 2000 drivers

And how does one get hold of 95C easily (..."legally")? It's an OEM release and I don't know of any way to patch a vanilla 95 up, only SP1 which brings it up to 95A.

Beefy GPUs aside, old computers generally have worse power consumption than modern ones.

I recently priced out the cheapest modern computer that I could build from parts, to potentially use as a NAS. Minus keyboard/mouse/monitor/speakers, it came out to under $150 (USD). I almost cried when I realized it would be much more powerful than my old Linux box (2.2GHz Athlon 64 X2 4200+, 2GB worth of 512MB RAM sticks, nVidia 7800GTX SLI).

BTW, that Linux box does okay with 480p flash videos, but I think it doesn't have enough oomph for 720p mkv/wmv videos. On the other hand, my HTPC has an even weaker Intel Atom CPU but does 1080p just fine due to GPU accelerated decoding, so I guess the trick is to get a cheap modern video card.

Your absolute cheapest option (besides finding a free junker) might be a Raspberry Pi with Linux. Not sure if ICQ or Skype would work with that setup, though.

leileilol wrote:

Minimum OS that is. Some people are a tad spoiled with 98se and forget that 95C is almost as capable too 😀 of course you could use Win98SE with 98lite to regain some speed with the old 95 shell.

Also if you don't mind a NTFS partition, you could even stretch down to NT 3.51 as a minimum OS. It also makes me wonder if there's a way to use NT 3.51 with FAT32 using certain Windows 2000 drivers

I wouldn't mind NTFS but it's slower on older machines than FAT32. Wouldn't this be a problem (especially if the CPU is something around P133 and the HDD is ATA66 ).

NT 3.51 sounds interesting. I never used NT, so this option grabbed my attention. I'm a bit unsure about the additional drivers (like audio, video, ethernet) and softwares that I need though; wouldn't be hard to find working builds for this OS?

Also, how is the network compatibility with Win XP and Win 7? Well I know that XP is NT-based (well Win2k, but that's also has relations with NT) but 3.51 is pretty old.

HunterZ wrote:

BTW, that Linux box does okay with 480p flash videos, but I think it doesn't have enough oomph for 720p mkv/wmv videos.

X2 4200+ + 2 GB RAM + 7800 GTX SLI is more than enough to play any 1080p HD flawlessly (even Hi10p *.mkvs). The problem probably lies in the player and codecs under Linux.

HunterZ wrote:

Beefy GPUs aside, old computers generally have worse power consumption than modern ones.

Most of them which I encountered was under 100W / hour. But it depends on what do you call "old" in this case. In my implementation, it would be something pre-P4/s462.

HunterZ wrote:

I recently priced out the cheapest modern computer that I could build from parts, to potentially use as a NAS. Minus keyboard/mouse/monitor/speakers, it came out to under $150 (USD).

Yep, you can make wonders from modern parts and limted resources, but in my case, the total spendable amount of money would be ~20 $ total for this rig. : )

QlShdR wrote:

HunterZ wrote:

BTW, that Linux box does okay with 480p flash videos, but I think it doesn't have enough oomph for 720p mkv/wmv videos.

X2 4200+ + 2 GB RAM + 7800 GTX SLI is more than enough to play any 1080p HD flawlessly (even Hi10p *.mkvs). The problem probably lies in the player and codecs under Linux.

Actually, it was several years ago when it was my main Windows XP desktop and I was trying to play HD .wmv videos in Windows Media Player (and Media Player Home Cinema I think). The problem was that the CPU itself was not powerful enough to do it, and GPU-accelerated decoding had not been realized yet.

Yep, you can make wonders from modern parts and limted resources, but in my case, the total spendabe amount of money would be ~20 $ total for this rig. : )

That definitely narrows it down to old parts (or a Raspberry Pi if you can find another $5 in coins under your couch cushions 😀 ).

If I was looking for old-but-not-ancient computer parts, I'd look for people giving away old computers for free on Craigslist.

QlShdR wrote:

- browsing the web relatively comfortably (maybe 480p YouTube would be nice too, but it's not THAT of a big deal, if the Flash p […]
Show full quote

- browsing the web relatively comfortably (maybe 480p YouTube would be nice too, but it's not THAT of a big deal, if the Flash plugin is not working, if otherwise I can use Google and various forums, maybe facebook too)
- able to run some old Skype build with audio call
- IRC
- ICQ
- listening to various bitrate *.mp3s
- watching DivX / XviD
- seeding with a torrent client (older Azureus or uTorrent build preferably)

The answer to this question is dynamic with time, but as of today, I would say it is a Tualatin 1.4 GHz. A dual Tualatin 1.4 GHz w/2GB DDR RAM is my everyday computer. A few months ago my everyday computer was a dual Coppermine 850 MHz. The limiting factor was Youtube videos and Flash-based web players. It is only a matter of time before web bloat overpowers the dual Tualatin 1.4 GHz .

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.

d1stortion wrote:

And how does one get hold of 95C easily (..."legally")? It's an OEM release and I don't know of any way to patch a vanilla 95 up, only SP1 which brings it up to 95A.

I own it legally through OEM laptop computers 😀

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

feipoa wrote:

... The limiting factor was Youtube videos and Flash-based web players. It is only a matter of time before web bloat overpowers the dual Tualatin 1.4 GHz ...

I agree, my single Tually still provides a quite decent browsing experience, but feels on the edge of being defeated by the contemporary (as of 2013) Flash bloat.

I hate colored text.

One of these days I am finally going to decommission my 1.13 GHz Celeron. Attempting to get anything done in XP with 512 MB of RAM is just too frustrating these days. It was okay with Windows 2000 (in fact I never recall it being as bad with Windows 2000 as it is with XP, which seems to run counter to conventional wisdom), but I don't trust its lack of security.

leileilol wrote:

Also if you don't mind a NTFS partition, you could even stretch down to NT 3.51 as a minimum OS. It also makes me wonder if there's a way to use NT 3.51 with FAT32 using certain Windows 2000 drivers

ToastyTech managed to do it with NT4, at least. The bootloader is key.
http://toastytech.com/guis/miscb2.html

TELVM wrote:

feipoa wrote:

... The limiting factor was Youtube videos and Flash-based web players. It is only a matter of time before web bloat overpowers the dual Tualatin 1.4 GHz ...

I agree, my single Tually still provides a quite decent browsing experience, but feels on the edge of being defeated by the contemporary (as of 2013) Flash bloat.

Same goes for Barton on KT133a. Even at 2.3Ghz it still stutters and chokes. Flash is just plain mean. 🙄 I believe it also has something to do with (lack-of) video acceleration.

Some of you guys who use these systems for videos and surfing must be masochists, I retired a 3700+ 1.5 years ago because it was easily hitting 100% CPU utilization. Fair enough, being that Flash is a bloated piece of junk a newer system didn't help a lot with skipped frames.

elfuego wrote:

TELVM wrote:

feipoa wrote:

... The limiting factor was Youtube videos and Flash-based web players. It is only a matter of time before web bloat overpowers the dual Tualatin 1.4 GHz ...

I agree, my single Tually still provides a quite decent browsing experience, but feels on the edge of being defeated by the contemporary (as of 2013) Flash bloat.

Same goes for Barton on KT133a. Even at 2.3Ghz it still stutters and chokes. Flash is just plain mean. 🙄 I believe it also has something to do with (lack-of) video acceleration.

What video cards are you guys using? Any cheap DX9 video card--even the lowly FX5200--will provide basic Flash video acceleration. Video decoding would still be handled by the CPU, but that shouldn't be a problem for any P3-S or Athlon XP. My Tually-S at 1.6 can easily handle full screen 480p YouTube on a 1440x900 monitor. CPU usage ranges from about 65-85% during playback. It can almost even handle 720p YT--around 16fps full screen, according to the YouTube player's embedded performance monitor. Based on these results I'd think that a 2.3GHz Athlon would be able to handle 720p Flash at a full 24fps with a DX9 graphics card.

The card makes a BIG difference. When I had a DX8 TI4200 in my P3, the most it could handle was 480p windowed--with 90-100% cpu usage and a bit of frame droppage here and there.

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