Yeah as daily machine it need at least 2GHz as speed and depend on what is the architecture, so Pentium IV on 2GHz is total joke, is more like it need 3GHz, while Athlon XP on 2GHz is great.
But the absolute minimum is 1GHz, and it will be really slow, some SSD can help and lot of good RAM, also fast GPU to compensate of the slow CPU...
I did remove the 128MB RAM of my Armada, and it did load win XP for ages, i did not even wait to see when it was going to load the damn XP with 32MB ram...

The slowest I had to actually use as a "main" system, as in using it for the usual daily tasks was quite a nightmare, neccesary out of issues with anything faster at the time.
It was late 2016 and consisted of:

• Pentium 4 505 (Prescott, 2.66 GHz) running on 3.4 GHz
• 3.73 GB RAM (Chipset limitation)
• Asus P5L 1394 (945P chipset)
• Radeon R7 250X (fastest fitting card around.
• Windows 7

Main use while waiting for the actual rig to be fixed up was watching videos. Alot of videos. So anything that helped accelerating codecs was welcome. Most of the parts came from an old prebuilt system that had been lying around for years.

Nowadays it's disassambled again. For good!

lordmogul wrote:

The slowest I had to actually use as a "main" system, as in using it for the usual daily tasks was quite a nightmare, neccesary […]
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The slowest I had to actually use as a "main" system, as in using it for the usual daily tasks was quite a nightmare, neccesary out of issues with anything faster at the time.
It was late 2016 and consisted of:

• Pentium 4 505 (Prescott, 2.66 GHz) running on 3.4 GHz
• 3.73 GB RAM (Chipset limitation)
• Asus P5L 1394 (945P chipset)
• Radeon R7 250X (fastest fitting card around.
• Windows 7

Main use while waiting for the actual rig to be fixed up was watching videos. Alot of videos. So anything that helped accelerating codecs was welcome. Most of the parts came from an old prebuilt system that had been lying around for years.

Nowadays it's disassambled again. For good!

It's almost faster than the fastest system I've used. 😁

A few years back when I was out of a job I spent nearly the entire summer at a little summer house my grandparents built. While there I used an Asus netbook with an Atom N570 (2cores/4threads, 1.66GHz) and 1GB or RAM.

Munx wrote:

A few years back when I was out of a job I spent nearly the entire summer at a little summer house my grandparents built. While there I used an Asus netbook with an Atom N570 (2cores/4threads, 1.66GHz) and 1GB or RAM.

Some years ago I used a lot some Atom N270/N450 netbooks and beside what many says, I found them quiet usable (even if I used XP and 7 Starter on them). I'd like to try them with some Lubuntu Linux os nowdays.

386SX wrote:

Munx wrote:

A few years back when I was out of a job I spent nearly the entire summer at a little summer house my grandparents built. While there I used an Asus netbook with an Atom N570 (2cores/4threads, 1.66GHz) and 1GB or RAM.

Some years ago I used a lot some Atom N270/N450 netbooks and beside what many says, I found them quiet usable (even if I used XP and 7 Starter on them). I'd like to try them with some Lubuntu Linux os nowdays.

RAM was the biggest issue for me. Opening a new tab or even starting the browser was a pain. Once stuff was open it was functional enough and when later I upgraded to 2GB it became a very nice little machine for browsing, youtube, etc.
Pretty crap when it came to 3D games, even with 90s ones like Unreal, however 2D games like Stronghold or Red Alert 2 run flawlessly.

Munx wrote:

386SX wrote:

Munx wrote:

A few years back when I was out of a job I spent nearly the entire summer at a little summer house my grandparents built. While there I used an Asus netbook with an Atom N570 (2cores/4threads, 1.66GHz) and 1GB or RAM.

Some years ago I used a lot some Atom N270/N450 netbooks and beside what many says, I found them quiet usable (even if I used XP and 7 Starter on them). I'd like to try them with some Lubuntu Linux os nowdays.

RAM was the biggest issue for me. Opening a new tab or even starting the browser was a pain. Once stuff was open it was functional enough and when later I upgraded to 2GB it became a very nice little machine for browsing, youtube, etc.
Pretty crap when it came to 3D games, even with 90s ones like Unreal, however 2D games like Stronghold or Red Alert 2 run flawlessly.

I remember the 3D subsystem wasn't fast. But at that time the cpu surprised me considering the power usage. I'd imagine even today it'd be faster than some smarphone cpu out there. I also remember trying XP on a Geode LX 800 cpu (500Mhz?) and wasn't that bad too.

Auzner wrote:

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.

Yeah, I'm fully aware of the codec situation. From H.264 to VP9, all the newer ones look better at lower bitrates, but are also that much more computationally intensive to decode, enough that anything without hardware acceleration that isn't Core 2 class is gonna choke.

It doesn't help that YouTube's broken older APIs from time to time, so stuff like CorePlayer's own YouTube interface just doesn't work.

My current Mac lineup right now is a IIcx (that has a 4 MB RAM limit for some dumb reason; broken traces I haven't found yet, perhaps), 6500/250, indigo iMac G3 350, MDD G4 FW800 dual 1.42, and the aforementioned 2005 iBook G4 14" 1.42.

The ideal collection for me would actually be to replace the IIcx with a Quadra or NuBus Power Mac (maybe a IIfx), the 6500 with a 9600, keep the MDD, and that'd be all save for the better MacBook Pros with IPS panels and dedicated graphics (which are still stupid expensive), or a "cheese grater" 2011-2012 Mac Pro (also still stupid expensive thanks to the unappealing, overheating trash can that replaced it).

As for the more recent comments about 3D subsystems on newer laptops, this has a lot to do with why I can't even stand to use more modern laptops like the Fujitsu T901 and T902 all that much. Having a decently fast dual-core i5 doesn't mean jack when integrated Intel graphics hold the whole thing back so much that you can't even run anything past UT'99 smoothly on 'em; even Doom 3's still a stretch since my P4EE/6800 Ultra box still runs that better.

It's for this reason that I wound up deconverging with a Wacom Cintiq Companion Hybrid for the pen-on-screen duties that normally limit me to convertibles with integrated graphics, while holding out for a laptop with dedicated graphics that I can stand to use. (2015 Retina MBP when the prices become sane, or any "VR-ready" laptop with a 120 Hz panel built-in, most likely.)

Funnily enough, the Cintiq Hybrid itself could be a manageable daily computing device with just a Tegra 4, but the fact is that Android 4.2.1 Jelly Bean with no updates past that already isn't holding up from a software compatibility standpoint, much less a secure one. Perfectly good hardware, held back by abysmal software support and the fact that ARM devices designed to run Android never had an "IBM-compatible" moment with standardized bootloading procedures until VERY recently in the form of Project Treble, the sorta thing that makes installing other OSes trivial.

i've had a toshiba nb205 since 2011 with 2gb ram and recently added an ssd. the batteries have held up, so i still carry it with me wherever i go.

an atom n270 has enough performance for playing music/modules and document editing, but that's about it. maybe some low resource emulators would perform well enough. a couple of years ago i gave up with dosbox on this laptop; the audio became unbearably choppy if fm music was playing.

I've always been Mr. Lower limits...

In 1997 I had a Tandy 1000 SX with 384K RAM and TGA and 3 voice, no HDD, an 2x 360K DSDD floppy drives. I used to turn in my english homework on pin-feed printer paper from a Epson Dot Matrix. My teachers used to chuckle, all written in Deskmate II.I also did song lyrics and guitar tabs in Deskmate II.

In 2001 I got my first 486, a ZEOS motherboard in a Flight 386 case, it was a 486 DX-33 with 8MB of RAM and a 124MB HDD. That was my first internet connected computer, and it had a 8250 UART, unidirectional serial port, so using that big ole 56K V90 US Robotics external modem with it required a big glass of ice water on top of the modem to keep it from frying from the heat trying to send data back synchronous.

Currently I've been trying it all again with my 486 DX4-100 system. So far the only things I can't do with it is play modern games, view the more idiotic and mainstream websites around, and that's about it. I even got a DAW setup giong on the 486 (n-track studio 3 on Windows 95 running on a VLB IDE Controller with an ATA-133 HDD). 3 tracks of audio is about all she can take though. CD-burning, yes, CD emulation, maybe, CAd, yes, circuit design, yes, word processing - Office 97 and Office 4.1 are more modern than you think, web design....DiDaPro and Netscape Communicator 4.08! Graphics" Graf-X II is my favorite. Emulators - Z26, NESTICLE, and even to a degree ESNES does well. It's kind of shocking what a broadband connected 486 with 64MB of RAM can still do.

the lowest i've gone was using a Compaq K6-2 500 with 128MB of RAM and integrated Trident graphics (MVP4) with Damn Small Linux and Firefox 2, in 2014, used that machine until it's death, 1 year later. maybe it was simply too much for it.

and later went using a netbook (atom 455, 2gb ram, 250gb hdd, 1366x768 10,1 inch display, XP sp3) all the time until mid 2017, when XP and Chrome started to be too slow for any use (youtube). then, bought a second hand notebook, a lenovo g480 with an i3 and 4gb of ram.

Nowdays it's difficult to use anything older than XP and a P4 with some post Geforce 6 card for web and such, however, for gaming (depending on the games), music playback, podcasts, word processing, email and even watching movies (depending on the quality, resolution and format -damn you google vp9-) the requirements are lower, to an exent

I'm reasonably happy using a Sony VAIO P series laptop with a single core 1.6Ghz Atom CPU and stripped back version of Windows 7. The Opera browser runs acceptably on it, but I find you need to give it a moment to load the website and then it's fine to use.

I use an old system as my main, everyday computer. It's the one I have in my signature, a Pentium 3-S 1.4Ghz with 1,2Gb of RAM (PC133), two 300Gb Western Digital Velociraptor hard drives and a Inno3D 6800GT graphics card over clocked to Ultra speeds. I run XP Home SP3 on it and I must say it runs very well, even better after optimizing it by disabling unnecessary services and using Eboosr to use part of the secondary hard drive for cache.

In future I would like to replace the graphics card with an ATI Radeon HD3850 and finding a bootable PCI SATA controller to let me use my Velociraptor in AHCI mode, instead of running it at ATA100 speed due to the SATA to IDE adapter (Silicon Image controllers didn't work properly with Velociraptors, sadly). Finding an error free 512MB PC133 stick is also a challenge since only one out of ten I bought proved to be error free.
I must be honest, but in the beginning I didn't plan to use the Tualatin as my daily driver, but after I began to use it regularly since last summer, I kind of got addicted to the point I seldom use my i7 laptop now, just to not cause problems to its hard drive due to long-term inactivity. 🤣