oeuvre wrote:

I really can't fathom how you are using a Pentium III for daily tasks. Browsing modern sites on even Pentium 4s is slow as molasses. I can't even imagine how slow it takes to render pages, especially heavier ones. And video sites? Forget it. Even for hte most basic of tasks like surfing and emailing, anything older than Core 2 Duo is going to have a bad time no matter how many Windows services you disable. Recently I tried Puppy Linux on a ThinkPad T42 (Pentium M 1.7GHz, 2GB RAM) and that was insufferable to browse the web with.

Disable flash, javascript, etc. and go back to good 'ol plain text 🤣

Or just disable ads with an adblocker and speed up the web by a factor of 3 😁

I've run Youtube/video sites on a late Pentium M with XP (my LG XNote LM50a), and it was.... well, surprisingly usable at 480p with the lastest FireFox ESR build for XP. As long as you single-tasked.

I'd honestly argue that trying to use Linux, even/especially Puppy, on old hardware with the modern web is a mistake. It never seems to handle the GPU properly and you end up with just unusable video playback and awful tearing. This is coming from someone who did use a 1 GHz Pentium III laptop a few years back with a Lubuntu install. Puppy was awful - Lubuntu was slow but stable and usable.

My main "beater" laptop is a 2 GHZ Core Duo + GMA950 (not a 2 Duo, a Duo) running Windows 7 with 2 GB and a 60 GB SSD. Actually totally usable. It was actually mostly okay even with it's original single core Celeron and the SSD, but the Core Duo made it good enough to use daily.

Xubuntu 16.04 on Pentium 4 3.0GHz works great here.

Regarding web browsing on a PIII, it's slow but certainly usable. I use Firefox with either the NoScript or NoScript Security Suite addons and it makes browsing so much smoother on these old systems. Not that I do it very often, but it was handy occasionally when using an old PIII 897MHz laptop for downloading floppy disk images etc. for DOS stuff.

Using a more lightweight browser than the hopeless Firefox may even produce a much smoother experience still.

About a month back I played around with YouTube on an old PIII 650MHz. At 360p the framerate was quite low and choppy, but it certainly played them - with 100% CPU usage. 🤣

My experience with Win7 on a PIII wasn't that great. I was testing on a very fast machine, too: PIII @ 1575, 2GB DDR, 6800GT. Lots of the Win7 UI just felt very laggy. Especially painful at higher resolutions. Try scrolling a full screen explorer window or resizing a window at 1920x1200...yikes. Doesn't matter whether desktop composition is on or off, and doesn't matter what chipset is used. Intel, VIA, it's all slow, so definitely CPU performance related. An Athlon XP 2800+ also had less than perfect UI performance at high resolutions.

I think that, even though Win7 doesn't require SSE2, it runs much better with it. The Athlon 64 3800+ and P4-640 both had perfectly smooth GUI performance at 1920x1200.

Firtasik wrote:

Xubuntu 16.04 on Pentium 4 3.0GHz works great here.

I tried a mid-weight linux distro (MX Linux) on a P3 933 with 512MB and a 128-bit FX5200 and it was usable only in the terminal and a few lightweight apps, as long as only one was running at a time. Firefox was painfully slow. Forget YouTube. It was just an experiment, I wasn't expecting it to run well, but it actually ran worse than I thought. It did do well in memory management, it didn't use up all 512MB unless I tried video streaming through the browser. MiniTube did a slightly better job than the browser, as I recall, mainly because it had less overhead in RAM consumption and CPU utilization.

I can't imagine Win10...

Standard Def Steve wrote:

My experience with Win7 on a PIII wasn't that great. I was testing on a very fast machine, too: PIII @ 1575, 2GB DDR, 6800GT. Lots of the Win7 UI just felt very laggy. Especially painful at higher resolutions. Try scrolling a full screen explorer window or resizing a window at 1920x1200...yikes. Doesn't matter whether desktop composition is on or off, and doesn't matter what chipset is used. Intel, VIA, it's all slow, so definitely CPU performance related. An Athlon XP 2800+ also had less than perfect UI performance at high resolutions.

I think that, even though Win7 doesn't require SSE2, it runs much better with it. The Athlon 64 3800+ and P4-640 both had perfectly smooth GUI performance at 1920x1200.

Wow that's like the ultimate config for this tech ! It's really DDR ram you used with your PIII ? I heared a few motherboards supported it...

For your problem, didnt you have some driver issues ? Scrolling the explorer should use hardware acceleration i'm surprised it was choppy for such a basic thing ! I'll tell you how mine does when i receive the parts.

LHN91 wrote:

I'd honestly argue that trying to use Linux, even/especially Puppy, on old hardware with the modern web is a mistake. It never seems to handle the GPU properly and you end up with just unusable video playback and awful tearing. This is coming from someone who did use a 1 GHz Pentium III laptop a few years back with a Lubuntu install. Puppy was awful - Lubuntu was slow but stable and usable.

I have the same opinion as you. I use Linux distros at work and they all seems to struggle with the GPU, UI is a bit sluggish even on i5 CPUs (with integrated graphics)... not sure if it's a driver issue or just an unoptimized GUI system. I've always felt Windows makes better use of my hardware. I don't know if we can blame Linux, it's more like the manufacturers don't care much about optimizing drivers for an OS used by few people

oeuvre wrote:

Cut

The secret, my friend, is "optimization". I have installed a series of plugins that were formerly recommended for PowerPC based Macintoshes and starting from those, I have also started to tweak the about:config settings of Firefox and Palemoon SSE in order to consume as less CPU and RAM as possible.

Also, with the help of Noscript, Bluhell Firewall, Flashblock and some other nifty plugins, I just blocked everything I didn't need, speeding up sites a lot, and if I need to view a particular site that is broken without javascript, I will just enable it for that one site.

Another massive help comes from Eboostr, that turns a USB drive into a cache drive, much like the Readyboost feature of Windows Vista and 7, but transposed on XP.

It is not. The VM will export a CPU with P3 capabilities so Win10 will refuse to install.

bullshit, qemu runs Windows 10 even on my smartphone 😉

So you can also run qemu on p3 and run windows 10 on qemu..
But be prepared, it will take ages to install.. and run..

matze79 wrote:

bullshit, qemu runs Windows 10 even on my smartphone ;) […]
Show full quote

It is not. The VM will export a CPU with P3 capabilities so Win10 will refuse to install.

bullshit, qemu runs Windows 10 even on my smartphone 😉

So you can also run qemu on p3 and run windows 10 on qemu..
But be prepared, it will take ages to install.. and run..

That's emulation, not virtualization, so... yes, very very slowly you could do that.

for what its worth i had windows 7 32bit installed on a PIII 700Mhz system a few years ago when win7 first came out
and it actually worked pretty good.. if im remembering correctly

okenido wrote:

Standard Def Steve wrote:

My experience with Win7 on a PIII wasn't that great. I was testing on a very fast machine, too: PIII @ 1575, 2GB DDR, 6800GT. Lots of the Win7 UI just felt very laggy. Especially painful at higher resolutions. Try scrolling a full screen explorer window or resizing a window at 1920x1200...yikes. Doesn't matter whether desktop composition is on or off, and doesn't matter what chipset is used. Intel, VIA, it's all slow, so definitely CPU performance related. An Athlon XP 2800+ also had less than perfect UI performance at high resolutions.

I think that, even though Win7 doesn't require SSE2, it runs much better with it. The Athlon 64 3800+ and P4-640 both had perfectly smooth GUI performance at 1920x1200.

Wow that's like the ultimate config for this tech ! It's really DDR ram you used with your PIII ? I heared a few motherboards supported it...

For your problem, didnt you have some driver issues ? Scrolling the explorer should use hardware acceleration i'm surprised it was choppy for such a basic thing ! I'll tell you how mine does when i receive the parts.

Yeah, PC3200 underclocked to 300MHz to match the 150MHz FSB. QDI Advance 12T motherboard. This thing just screams under XP SP3, but Win7 is a little too much for it.

The drivers were installed. I could get Aero Glass and everything else. The CPU was just too slow, which really isn't surprising. The Core i7 had already been available for a year by the time Windows 7 launched. Microsoft was targeting faster systems, which is fine. On the target hardware (dual core CPU or faster), Windows 7 is much nicer to use than XP. But on a PIII, you'll want to stick with XP.

I received my motherboard and graphics card today ! Installed Windows 7 professional + SP1. Installation took about 20 mins, faster than what i expected.

Current config is:
PIII 933mhz coppermine
Asus P3V4X motherboard
Radeon HD4650
120GB SSD connected through IDE/SATA adapter
1GB ram (4*256MB, waiting for my 512MB sticks to arrive)

Didnt tried web browsing or games atm, it needs some drivers before 🤣

Seems there are no Windows7 drivers for Via Apollo Pro 133A chipset, should I do something like trying to install old windows NT drivers (for IDE i guess?) or just leave windows7 default drivers ?

SW-SSG wrote:

okenido wrote:

Ooh sad !
I'll try with 7 then. Most programs works on it so it's fine 😀

From my understanding, Win10 is lighter on system resources than Win7 is, even if 10 requires various newer CPU features. This probably won't end well...

Windows 10 is in no way lighter on system resources. It is the only OS that I have ever seen that used 50% of CPU, 99% of HDD, and 50% of RAM on a fresh boot.

okenido wrote:

Seems there are no Windows7 drivers for Via Apollo Pro 133A chipset, should I do something like trying to install old windows NT drivers (for IDE i guess?) or just leave windows7 default drivers ?

I would get a SATA->PCI card or just leave default drivers.

for OS newer than windows XP 1GB is very limiting, even 1.5GB will be a good improvement, but 2GB at least is ideal

andreja6 wrote:

SW-SSG wrote:

okenido wrote:

Ooh sad !
I'll try with 7 then. Most programs works on it so it's fine 😀

From my understanding, Win10 is lighter on system resources than Win7 is, even if 10 requires various newer CPU features. This probably won't end well...

Windows 10 is in no way lighter on system resources. It is the only OS that I have ever seen that used 50% of CPU, 99% of HDD, and 50% of RAM on a fresh boot.

Yup, and it cheats. But that's not surprising. Win 10 is sneaky, after all. 😉
- While the GUI might be back quite fast, the system isn't really functional at this point.
A lot of backround activity is still going on (what for ?) and it isn't very responsive yet.
Windows XP vs Windows 10 Boot Time

Jo22 wrote:

Windows XP vs Windows 10 Boot Time

Intel Atom ewww... thats not a benchmark, that's a CPU snuff vid tourturing that little abomination! o.0

My M6800 acts like my MacBook from 2008... lift the lid, a second or two later its there. On the rare occasion that I shut down... takes about 5 seconds from pressing the power button to being at login again, plus 2 more seconds to desktop. There might be stuff working in the background, but with 16gig and a i7 4710MQ, its unnoticeable 😀.

Currently my grief with Win10 is that half my icons have disappeared in the start menu, and the ones that didn't, have rearranged themselves in some strange spaced out tiling like it thinks I have 2km^2 space to display it... that and my sticky notes decided to go awol one day without dumping their contents (important notes) somewhere, and then magically reappeared 3 months later (with contents) when I logged on? I mean seriously wtf!

Other than its quirks, its not bad and performs like a champ ime (and has done for nearly 2 years now)... having said that, my home workstation won't be upgraded from 8.1 pro.. in fact the next iteration might go back to BSD and VM windows o.0.... and yes no doubt thanks to telemtry MS knows what I'm doing before I do it on my laptop, but its not like the internet hasn't been tracking us for the past god knows how many years. 🤣