Very interesting solution. I was about to suggest Puppy Linux for you - I booted that up on my P3 1GHz CuMine and had no issues browsing the web (at least the parts of the web I use; I don't do a lot of heavy multi-media stuff - Vogons, for example, loaded with no problems).

I like Windows. And I'm going to play games and wrote code on it for fun.

Finding solutions to work within the confines of a memory-constrained system is what makes this interesting. For example, tunneling X over ssh isn't very responsive for things like scrolling a web page, even over a LAN. So I'm going to try and put together some nx session scripts to compress it further and see how fast it can be; or whether it's network bound, cpu bound, etc.

The laptop has a mini-pci slot which used to house a card which enabled the phone/lan jacks. I replaced this with a Wireless N adapter to improve bandwidth for this scenario. Simpler UIs are quite snappy.

I would use a KernelEx'd Seamonkey 2.0 if it's Windows98SE.

It's Windows XP and the problem is memory, not compatibility.

http://virtuallyfun.superglobalmegacorp.com/?p=3866
http://virtuallyfun.superglobalmegacorp.com/?p=3910

An interesting approach. Rendering to an image, even with clickable regions, is not interactive. For example, you wouldn't be able to use a text field or drop down box.

The last time I ran on a browser on a retro rig was opera two years ago on a P1 rig that is years older than your laptop. Give Opera a try but support isn't perfect and adobe flash is just a hog on its own. Will run on such a ram limited system for basic browsing but flash or java heavy sites all I can say is good luck. I prefer the Pentium 700 series for retro laptops, runs super cool and has enough bang for windows 7 despite being nothing more than a supped up pentium 3.

Media Player Classic is handy for this too combined with Livestreamer if you intend to watch Twitch and some other streaming sites just to get past the Flash CPU bottleneck. Yes, even for ~700MHz PCs. Flash sucks, is the ultimate deciding factor if a computer is 'too obsolete for web'.

Now if only there was something similar to handle Youtube...

leileilol wrote:

Media Player Classic is handy for this too combined with Livestreamer if you intend to watch Twitch and some other streaming sites just to get past the Flash CPU bottleneck. Yes, even for ~700MHz PCs. Flash sucks, is the ultimate deciding factor if a computer is 'too obsolete for web'.

Now if only there was something similar to handle Youtube...

You can manually download most videos and play them with just about any media player, it is only videos with locked music that refuse to download. 😢