VOGONS


First post, by CkRtech

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Hey guys -

Most of the non-modern stuff I do is Win 98 or earlier.

I acquired an old laptop with an AMD-K6-something @ 366 with 160 MB of RAM. It is dual-booting fresh installs of Windows 98 SE and Windows XP SP3.

Can you guys recommend a browser that can take advantage of the XP environment (vs 98SE) and work with the limited instruction sets of this processor?

I am trying to find that sweet spot of performance/CPU instructions/OS/security for this guy. And of course, this is a tug in 4 different directions.

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Reply 1 of 12, by BinaryDemon

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I would give QTWeb a try. Dillo is even more lightweight, but it's rendering is pretty poor.

Check out DOSBox Distro:

https://sites.google.com/site/dosboxdistro/ [*]

a lightweight Linux distro (tinycore) which boots off a usb flash drive and goes straight to DOSBox.

Make your dos retrogaming experience portable!

Reply 2 of 12, by CkRtech

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Thanks, BinaryDemon. Will do.

Displaced Gamers (YouTube) - DOS Gaming Aspect Ratio - 320x200 || The History of 240p || Dithering on the Sega Genesis with Composite Video

Reply 3 of 12, by notsofossil

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I'm amazed you put Windows XP on a machine of that age, I would hesitate to put even Windows 2000 on something like that.

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Reply 4 of 12, by dr_st

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notsofossil wrote:

I'm amazed you put Windows XP on a machine of that age, I would hesitate to put even Windows 2000 on something like that.

Ditto.

Moreover, I don't see the point. It will be anything but usable experience.

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Reply 5 of 12, by xjas

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Netsurf will probably run well on it, but the modern web won't. It least it'll give you a shot at something up-to-date though. You should be able to post to this forum if nothing else.

I'd recommend trying an old verion of Opera too (something like Opera 8 or 10) but modern web standards & SSL have made anything that old useless.

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Reply 6 of 12, by weldum

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the thing is that to be able to take advantage of XP web browsers, you need at least something with SSE2 at least o a Pentium 3/Athlon and older Firefox or Opera

otherwise you're just fine with 98SE

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Reply 7 of 12, by ATauenis

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CkRtech wrote:

I acquired an old laptop with an AMD-K6-something @ 366 with 160 MB of RAM. It is dual-booting fresh installs of Windows 98 SE and Windows XP SP3.

160 MB of RAM is very little amount for WinXP. All browsers that uses XP benefits will eat all your RAM in few seconds. Only IE6 or older Mozillas (such as Firefox 2, SeaMonkey 1.1 or Mozilla 1.7) might be usable and not too slow. But they are not well compatible with modern sites. Because almost all modern websites are using forced strong encryption (TLS 1.2 256-bit), they are require a browser that supports the strong encryption.

All Gecko-based browsers from 2006 and later are compatible with modern websites out of box. They cannot run most scripts and other active content, as they are based on latest versions of jQuery, but the text and pictures should be visible. And they are working really fast.

To use IE6/7 or Opera on WinXP SP2 or SP3 with the modern web there are two important updates: KB968730 and KB3055973. Some people say that only KB4019276 may be useful, but I'm successfully added the support of TLS 1.2 256-bit to XP SP2 with the two previous updates. IE6 SP2/3 is the most fastest browser for XP, but it is from 2004 and it has very bad renderer that is working very bad. IE7 is a something better, but it likes to freeze the system. IE8 does not require TLS updates and is compatible with almost all modern sites, but it consumes big amount of RAM. Operas 8...10 are working like Firefox 2, but some sites are displaying as a blank white page due to bug in the renderer of Opera.

Only Opera 12 (even on Windows 2000) does not requiring the TLS updates and is working with the modern web almost perfectly. But it is very slow on old hardware. Even on P3-933 with 1024MB of RAM it works very sloooow.

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Reply 10 of 12, by dionb

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Indeed. Back in 2005 or so I donated a spare PC to the local student union, desperate for an extra computer and no cash to spare of course. It had very similar specs to this, a P2-400 with 160MB and - because they insisted - WinXP. Even back then when websites were much, much lighter than now, it was a total pig, constantly thrashing to HDD. An even remotely modern browser will be much heavier than the Opera an IE back then, and the websites far, far worse. Also note that XP itself bloated significantly through service packs and updates. A system that ran it acceptably in 2001 might well struggle badly with a fully updated version.

Also websites demand far, far more CPU. Anything prior to Core2Duo/later Athlon64 X2 will feel slooow on most sites regardless of installed RAM (and OS and browser). It's no overstatement to consider web browsing the most performance-critical application on a general-purpose system.

TLDR: XP on this beast is painful, graphical web browsing more so. If you want to browse on this system, do Linux + Lynx (text-mode browser). Save graphical browsing for a modern system.

Reply 11 of 12, by .legaCy

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My pentium 3 can open vogons quite well, but i consider vogons a retro friendly site, opening other modern sites like msn, yahoo is just a big no no, i run firefox 2 on my pentium 4 and for all the retro friendly sites that i know it handle just fine.

Reply 12 of 12, by CkRtech

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notsofossil wrote:

I'm amazed you put Windows XP on a machine of that age, I would hesitate to put even Windows 2000 on something like that.

To be honest, I didn't give it much thought simply because XP was already on it and it came with the XP disc as well.

I mostly just wanted to make a portable MSX disk writing machine, but the lack of SSE2 kinda destroyed web crawling possibilities.

Displaced Gamers (YouTube) - DOS Gaming Aspect Ratio - 320x200 || The History of 240p || Dithering on the Sega Genesis with Composite Video