I think that as soon you get used to a slower experience you almost like the system doing its best even if slowly and not needing a faster one. By the way I consider the Athlon XP times the last I enjoyed starting from the Z80 of the console and the 80386 of the pc.

I am posting this from "Project Pentium" using RetroZilla and an Ethernet card. (Now at 233MHz, I think I was having stability issues with 262.5)

Once you add an ad-blocking hosts file, turn off Javascript, and set your user agent to Lynx, it's just about barely usable. Google still hosts a 2003-era interface for legacy clients which works well enough, but nearly everything else, other than the endangered species of Web1.0 holdouts like ToastyTech, are exercises in extreme patience. It visibly struggles to browse Vogons, a "minimalist" site by today's standards. I only use the browser as a novelty, if I'm feeling masochistic, or if I'm really just too lazy to look something up on my laptop which is usually on the bed no more than 10 feet away from me.

Take the Internet out of the equation, however, and it's still a decently productive machine. I installed Office 97 on a whim and actually used this machine to type up most of my college application essay. Office hasn't really fundamentally changed since then; most versions afterwards can be summed up as graphical polishings to match stylistically with whatever Windows was out at a given time.

Well...I pulled the trigger and bought this:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/391616839376

This will be my new daily driver. Office, some light photoshop/premiere type work, maybe minecraft. Everything else heavy duty (Gaming, transcoding, heavy rendering) will be done on my "gaming" rig since it's more powerful.

The BEST thing about this is that I can sell off or trade this pile of old Macs I had been curating to do the job and move my gaming rig to another area and keep my main desk nice and clean. Already looking into getting a dock for the thing too.

ElementalChaos wrote:

I installed Office 97 on a whim and actually used this machine to type up most of my college application essay.

Excellent. I wrote a few of my essays on my Socket 5 box running Windows 3.1 and Office 4.3.

BTW you'd better be applying to CU Boulder. Actually, it seems like half the students are from Illinois; can't figure out why though 🤣

Senrew: Looks like a nice mid-range machine.

Yeah. It'll do for the general stuff, plus being portable, I can sit on the couch or whatever and do what I want to do. When I get the dock, I'll be much better with my mechanical keyboard too.

The title of this thread is how I got into Retro-PC's actually.....EVERYTHING I've had up until about the past six or seven years was old when I got it....

Main computer 1998-2001 - Tandy 1000 SX with 384K (later 640K RAM) - Granted, I did not use internet at home back then, mostly all I did was classwork and play old DOS games on it. I remember the teacher was tripping at how all the kids in his class turned in their homework on regular printer paper in Times Roman font, then here I am with a 12-pin Dot Matrix printout in standard 80x25 column text on pinfeed paper.

Main Computer Feb-July 2001 - Flight 386 SX - which I used as a 386 SX for a week, then yanked the motherboard and threw a ZEOS 386/486 upgradeable system's mainboard with a 486 DX-33 and 8MB of RAM on it in there. It had VGA, a 124MB HDD, no sound card, and an Addonics VGA monitor and Kingspao enclosure. This was the first computer I had the internet on, and that's all I wanted it for at the time as internet access, and it was sthe only PC I wanted.....but other people....oh, they opened their closets.....

Main Computer July 2001 November 2002/November 2005 - 1995 IBM PC-330 100DX4 6571-W5K - a 100MHz 486 DX4 that started off with 8MB of RAM, 540MB HDD, and no L2 Cache, which was used by a Montgomery Alabama bank for awhile. My Room mate at the time gave me her old 5x86 133 and that had 256K L2 Cache in it so I moved the L2 to the IBM, and the Intel felt faster than the AMD, so I left the DX4 in there. I still ran this as a main and backup system well into 2005, and it was smy favorite 486, I still look for one like it when I can, though now they go for astronomically insane prices now. At it's strongest it dual boot Windows 98 SE and DOS 6.22/WFWG311 through the BIOS (you could switch boot order in the BIOS like a modern PC on this one), had 64MB of EDO ECC RAM, and had a total of about 20GB of HDD Space on it. It ran ANYTHING I threw at it and did so extremely well - Doom, no problem, Duke Nukem 3D, Great! Diablo - hell it's not even supposed to run on this thing and I got full frame rate and could play online (and did) over 56K Dialup on this computer. It even ran Postal with the Special Delivery expansion at one point (albeit with crap framerate, 1MB Cirrus Logic video was sjust not enough for it). If it had not died, I would still be using it to this day. I really ran the crap out of this old thing.

Main Computer November 2002 - March 2008 - GEM Computer Products 386 DX-20 upgraded to a Socket 7 Pentium, then later case modded into a Celeron 500, then a PIII 667, and lastly a PIII 1GHz with 1/2 a Gig of RAM (512MB). This computer pretty much ran as EVERY PC generation from 80386-Pentium III. I had to modify the backplane, the power swupply, and the case was cool as sfuck, but it was sort of my problem child in that it blew up hardware frequently, though that became much less of a problem during it's final years as a Pentium III. It started off Running DOS 6.21 and Windows 3.1, and then got upgraded to bigger IDE drives from a hardcard and a ST-412/506 Seagate 40MB MFM HDD and I started running Windows 98 SE on it, till the upgrade to 1GHz proved too unstable under Win98se, so I then went to Windows 2000 Professional SP3. This is the computer I started my YouTube Channel with, the computer I spent a lot of time building, hot-rodding, and modding. I used the ever-loving-crap out of it.

Main Computer March 2008 - June 2015 - In 2008 I was becoming friends with some colleagues, I guess. They kept making fun of my PIII in a 386 AT chassis, and started trying to get me to join them in modern gaming a bit, so I used my retro-skills to cobble together for $800 a pretty decent gaming rig locally sourcing most of the parts except the CPU. In the end, I had a system that lasted 8 years under mostly the same specs - 3.4GHz Pentium D, 4GB of RAM, NVIDIA 8800GT, and it ran Windows XP 32-bit at first, then got upgraded to Windows 7 x64, now it's my wife's computer and runs Windows 10 x64 9 years later and has no issues with that either.

Current Main Computer - December 2015 - present - I split my time these days between two Core 2 laptops - a Toshiba I got this past summer on a visit to some friends in Reno, and a HP G70 I found in the dumpster and repaired for dirt cheap using spares and parts from E-bay/RE-PC. Both run Windows 10 x64...but even then....one system now, I've been using MORE than those, all I ever use those for is web surfing, games, and bills......

My current 80486 DX2-66 actually gets more use than the Core 2's do. I'm always playing some game, chatting on IRC, and I've been looking into various smultitrack-recording options using the 486 (need to find a copy of Quartz AudioMaster Freeware and see how it does). Of course, the DX2-66 I have is a beast of a machine, it has 28GB of Disk space total through various DDO/Hardware tricks. It's not that slow, actually it runs Duke Nukem 3D, NES Emulation, ESNES, and Retro City Rampage 486 decently enough without too much frame rate drop. However, I'm still upgrading it. Iv'e been tempted to do what that one blogger did and take the REAL Windows 3.1x for a month challenge - I'm sure I could outdo him in productivity - maybe even circles. I do have my gmail setup on that computer and it works great albeit a little slow. I can also burn CDs (CDROAST !!!).

senrew wrote:

Well...I pulled the trigger and bought this:

This will be my new daily driver. Office, some light photoshop/premiere type work, maybe minecraft. Everything else heavy duty (Gaming, transcoding, heavy rendering) will be done on my "gaming" rig since it's more powerful.

Very good laptops. I did not like their design at first but they somehow "grow" on you. Still, the EliteBook's silver theme seems prettier to me.
We used these (6465b and 6475b) at work for 2+ years. One single hinge froze (and broke the screen where it attaches to it because the user still tried using it) out of about 50 laptops. On the 6465b we had several failed fans and the batteries (not the ones with the XL suffix in the code) were pretty bad. This was the point HP released a normal lower priced 1yr and an "extended life" expensive 3yr warranty battery. Pretty strange move.

For a period of time in 2004-2005, I used a 66MHz 486 with 8MB of ram as my main box when I killed the Windows install on my Pentium III box. To be fair though, I still got a fair amount of use out of my Pentium III by running Knoppix on it. There was also a brief period around 2010-2011ish where I used my 2004 era Acer Travelmate with a 1.6GHz Pentium M and 512MB of ram, since the hard drive crashed on my main rig and I was trying to reduce the strain on it.

creepingnet wrote:

The title of this thread is how I got into Retro-PC's actually.....EVERYTHING I've had up until about the past six or seven year […]
Show full quote

The title of this thread is how I got into Retro-PC's actually.....EVERYTHING I've had up until about the past six or seven years was old when I got it....

Main computer 1998-2001 - Tandy 1000 SX with 384K (later 640K RAM) - Granted, I did not use internet at home back then, mostly all I did was classwork and play old DOS games on it. I remember the teacher was tripping at how all the kids in his class turned in their homework on regular printer paper in Times Roman font, then here I am with a 12-pin Dot Matrix printout in standard 80x25 column text on pinfeed paper.

Main Computer Feb-July 2001 - Flight 386 SX - which I used as a 386 SX for a week, then yanked the motherboard and threw a ZEOS 386/486 upgradeable system's mainboard with a 486 DX-33 and 8MB of RAM on it in there. It had VGA, a 124MB HDD, no sound card, and an Addonics VGA monitor and Kingspao enclosure. This was the first computer I had the internet on, and that's all I wanted it for at the time as internet access, and it was sthe only PC I wanted.....but other people....oh, they opened their closets.....

Main Computer July 2001 November 2002/November 2005 - 1995 IBM PC-330 100DX4 6571-W5K - a 100MHz 486 DX4 that started off with 8MB of RAM, 540MB HDD, and no L2 Cache, which was used by a Montgomery Alabama bank for awhile. My Room mate at the time gave me her old 5x86 133 and that had 256K L2 Cache in it so I moved the L2 to the IBM, and the Intel felt faster than the AMD, so I left the DX4 in there. I still ran this as a main and backup system well into 2005, and it was smy favorite 486, I still look for one like it when I can, though now they go for astronomically insane prices now. At it's strongest it dual boot Windows 98 SE and DOS 6.22/WFWG311 through the BIOS (you could switch boot order in the BIOS like a modern PC on this one), had 64MB of EDO ECC RAM, and had a total of about 20GB of HDD Space on it. It ran ANYTHING I threw at it and did so extremely well - Doom, no problem, Duke Nukem 3D, Great! Diablo - hell it's not even supposed to run on this thing and I got full frame rate and could play online (and did) over 56K Dialup on this computer. It even ran Postal with the Special Delivery expansion at one point (albeit with crap framerate, 1MB Cirrus Logic video was sjust not enough for it). If it had not died, I would still be using it to this day. I really ran the crap out of this old thing.

Main Computer November 2002 - March 2008 - GEM Computer Products 386 DX-20 upgraded to a Socket 7 Pentium, then later case modded into a Celeron 500, then a PIII 667, and lastly a PIII 1GHz with 1/2 a Gig of RAM (512MB). This computer pretty much ran as EVERY PC generation from 80386-Pentium III. I had to modify the backplane, the power swupply, and the case was cool as sfuck, but it was sort of my problem child in that it blew up hardware frequently, though that became much less of a problem during it's final years as a Pentium III. It started off Running DOS 6.21 and Windows 3.1, and then got upgraded to bigger IDE drives from a hardcard and a ST-412/506 Seagate 40MB MFM HDD and I started running Windows 98 SE on it, till the upgrade to 1GHz proved too unstable under Win98se, so I then went to Windows 2000 Professional SP3. This is the computer I started my YouTube Channel with, the computer I spent a lot of time building, hot-rodding, and modding. I used the ever-loving-crap out of it.

Main Computer March 2008 - June 2015 - In 2008 I was becoming friends with some colleagues, I guess. They kept making fun of my PIII in a 386 AT chassis, and started trying to get me to join them in modern gaming a bit, so I used my retro-skills to cobble together for $800 a pretty decent gaming rig locally sourcing most of the parts except the CPU. In the end, I had a system that lasted 8 years under mostly the same specs - 3.4GHz Pentium D, 4GB of RAM, NVIDIA 8800GT, and it ran Windows XP 32-bit at first, then got upgraded to Windows 7 x64, now it's my wife's computer and runs Windows 10 x64 9 years later and has no issues with that either.

Current Main Computer - December 2015 - present - I split my time these days between two Core 2 laptops - a Toshiba I got this past summer on a visit to some friends in Reno, and a HP G70 I found in the dumpster and repaired for dirt cheap using spares and parts from E-bay/RE-PC. Both run Windows 10 x64...but even then....one system now, I've been using MORE than those, all I ever use those for is web surfing, games, and bills......

My current 80486 DX2-66 actually gets more use than the Core 2's do. I'm always playing some game, chatting on IRC, and I've been looking into various smultitrack-recording options using the 486 (need to find a copy of Quartz AudioMaster Freeware and see how it does). Of course, the DX2-66 I have is a beast of a machine, it has 28GB of Disk space total through various DDO/Hardware tricks. It's not that slow, actually it runs Duke Nukem 3D, NES Emulation, ESNES, and Retro City Rampage 486 decently enough without too much frame rate drop. However, I'm still upgrading it. Iv'e been tempted to do what that one blogger did and take the REAL Windows 3.1x for a month challenge - I'm sure I could outdo him in productivity - maybe even circles. I do have my gmail setup on that computer and it works great albeit a little slow. I can also burn CDs (CDROAST !!!).

Thanks for this post. 😀

Updating my test on the lower main config (with the rule I have no other/faster running machine built) I am lately trying this Athlon Thunderbird 1333/133 with 1,2GB of PC133 and a udma2 disk. I choosed the Debian road for the os and now using it with a quiet modern kernel and latest features. Not bad at all even without any ssd or whatever to speed up the system.
I already tried with some low speed problem a K6-2+ with this os, and it will be my next config to rebuild.

Hey guys.
I have a question, for the people who have Orinoco PCMCIA cards, are you using them on DOS? Which drivers do you use, along with other software that might be necessary?
I have a chance to get one of them for about 15€, do you think it is worth? My machine is currently using FreeDOS 1.0, and is a Pentium 1 with 64mbs of ram.
THANKS!

I'm currently using a Lenovo 3000 C200 for my main laptop. Got it for 5$, with 1 GB of RAM and a single core processor. Upgraded it to 2 GB of RAM and a 2 GHz Core Duo (the 32 bit Yonah core) and it's really quite usable.

As a kid, we had a Pentium 233 MMX until about 2004-5 as the family computer, and I had a 386 based desktop PS/2 with 3.1 and some huge desktop generic 486 with 95 on it for myself during those years.

Most of my main daily systems are already 10 years old, from the Intel Core 2 & AMD Athlon 64 X2 era. They're all running either Windows 7, 8.1 or 10. I should definitely upgrade to something more modern, but I find myself buying stuff like my recent purchases of 8088 & 286 motherboards instead. 🤣

Back in the early-mid 2000s I used an AMD K6-2 300MHz, 128MB RAM & running Windows XP Pro. Was used for general day to day stuff, including browsing the web and downloading, MS Office, Macromedia Dreamweaver & even Adobe Photoshop. Also did some VCD encoding on it. In general it worked quite well and even handled light gaming, with settings turned right down. Not bad for a system that didn't even have any L2 Cache!

Around the same time I also briefly ran a 486 as a web server, with Windows 2000 on 64MB RAM. It did have a Cyrix 5x86 100MHz though, which enabled 2000 to even boot. Worked well for months, albeit slowly, before the CPU fried (I had no idea back then about the voltage differences and had it running on a 5V board, oops).

Back in December 2010 my daily driver AMD64 system broke down, so for a month I did my internet browsing on an HP e-PC desktop, with a 933 MHz Pentium III and 256MB PC-133 SDRAM people often thought that such a system was incapable of running Windows XP SP3 - that was a lie because that system was surprisingly good at what I used it for which included 240p YouTube videos, Office 2007, and even Virtual PC which had a Windows 98SE VM installed in it.

In Fall 2015 I used a 2006 Mac Mini as a daily driver as an excuse to see if Mac OS X was of any use to me, it was the lowliest of the Intel lineup (Core Solo @ 1.5 GHz, 2GB max RAM, and a 60GB HDD) but it worked fine, admittedly the only sites I really browsed on it were the usual forums I frequent so it wasn't that bad.

These days I still turn to my HP DC7800 C2Q system whenever I get tired of Windows 10 or I need a disk imaged.

From 2010 to 2013 my main computer was a PowerMac G5 2.0GHz DP. It's not that low on specs but after Apple's ditching of PowerPC architecture the biggest headache is getting new software running on it or finding alternatives.

My old main machine is my 462 Armored Interceptor and it can do all i need (of course new games are mirage but old are ok) it can browse the internet really fast, it can use patched skype to contact ppl, you tube 1080P, movies 1080p.....

https://imgur.com/a/mubGE

My second machine is LanParty Ultra-D NF4 and Opteron 165, is not that old but still it uses DDR400.....

https://imgur.com/a/TnvD1

In 2005 I used an IBM ThinkPad 770ED 266MHz P2 with 384MB of ram and it ran windows xp and networked alright. It was slower than what I was accustomed to but it was a free laptop I had upgrade memory for. It surprised me how well it worked for its specs.

lazibayer wrote:

From 2010 to 2013 my main computer was a PowerMac G5 2.0GHz DP. It's not that low on specs but after Apple's ditching of PowerPC architecture the biggest headache is getting new software running on it or finding alternatives.

I thought it was bad a decade ago when I tried to use a Pismo PowerBook G3 400 with Tiger roughly around 2008. Hey, it was cheap and I wanted to know what the big deal about old Pismos was.

It's so much worse now that every Mac user is expected to be using an Intel system with the latest macOS. Finding PowerPC-compatible software is a pain, doubly so if running Tiger instead of Leopard, and any earlier OS X version might as well come on drink coasters for being more useless than OS 9.2.2. Oh, and don't get me started on YouTube; trying to view anything there on PowerPC is an exercise in frustration and slideshows.

As much as I'd like to put my iBook G4 1.42 in more active use, I just can't. It's too obsolete for its own good, even being the last of the iBooks. I honestly find my Pentium 4-era systems on Windows XP (both the custom P4EE 3.2 GHz build I use for retrogaming and my recent Dell Inspiron 8200 yard sale find) to be far more usable on the modern Web, even if I wouldn't want to do anything that requires any semblance of security on them.

Honestly, if not for the modern Web, I could get by with much weaker hardware for everyday computing (not gaming, obviously), but the modern Internet is the point for a modern computer, such that any system that can't handle its bloat is already too obsolete. I wouldn't go older than Core 2 Duo on a daily driver for that reason, and guaranteed dual-core (sometimes quad, as my decade-old Q6600 box is still running strong enough that everyone else in the house doesn't complain about using it) means that multitasking isn't an exercise in patience like it is on a single-core Windows XP box from 2002 with only 512 MB of RAM.

For everything else? Older versions of MS Office/ClarisWorks/whatever, Photoshop, Acrobat, etc. do the job as well as they did when they were new. It's not like you need that much computing power to put words or numbers on a sheet. The only problem is Microsoft defaulting to a newer, more proprietary format post-Office 2007 in a bid to get everyone to upgrade.

Also, as for recent hardware that has a lot of similar issues, try browsing the modern Web on a Raspberry Pi Zero. It fares even worse than those old Pentium 4 and PowerPC G4 boxes.

Auzner wrote:

In 2005 I used an IBM ThinkPad 770ED 266MHz P2 with 384MB of ram and it ran windows xp and networked alright. It was slower than what I was accustomed to but it was a free laptop I had upgrade memory for. It surprised me how well it worked for its specs.

You can`t use that now as main, it will be hell slow, maybe an desktop variant of that laptop will be able to do something...

Well at least that IBM did have bigger memory, it is from x2 slots or only one ram slot ? As i have Compaq Armada and i will like to add way more memory, as now it have only 160MB..

NamelessPlayer wrote:

Finding PowerPC-compatible software is a pain, doubly so if running Tiger instead of Leopard
As much as I'd like to put my iBook G4 1.42 in more active use, I just can't. It's too obsolete for its own good

A lot of web now is multimedia content using the hardware accelerated codecs and instructions built into phones, gpus, cpus, tvs, nowadays. The older stuff lacks interfaces much less drivers to add in such acceleration. And the codec of choice seems to change about every 5-8 years. So in this case it's not just Apple obsoleting their parts from the web.

If I had your software requirements, I would get a G4 cube or a nice aluminum dual G5 tower. I don't collect Macs but they do look neat.

Radical Vision wrote:

You can`t use that now as main, it will be hell slow, maybe an desktop variant of that laptop will be able to do something...

It was slow as hell back then too. 2GHz dual cores were just coming out. Windows XP though was still the modern OS to use so I had that going for me.