swaaye wrote:It's reminiscent of the original eMachines boxes. Actually this kind of thing was everywhere back then. PCs with so little RAM they would be swapping to disk immediately upon boot.
Today's budget stuff is so much better because RAM is so cheap now.
Wouldn't it have made more sense to use a decent amount of slower/cheaper RAM along with a lower cost (but still decent quality) board/CPU than a crippled set-up like that? . . . Oh, wait, marketing a bigger number and "Intel inside" would be easier to sell to ignorant customers than a more decent machine of the same price. (though, even then, a decent Pentium MMX based system with 128MB EDO DRAM would have been a lot better in general use, or in a less extreme case, a slower celeron+128MB . . . but then you'd still have to market the system badged with a much lower clock speed)
And, of course, the often horribly bloated default installs of those types of machines made the situation much worse.
swaaye wrote:I think IGPs are completely adequate for general desktop usage. That's what a budget PC is intended for. The modern $400 machine […]
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jaqie wrote:
I actually disagree. budget stuff isn't much better, mainly because it's still starving the system of ram bandwidth by the onboard video using system ram and bandwidth for it's tasks, to the point that even some things that are simple tasks now can choke the PC.
I think IGPs are completely adequate for general desktop usage. That's what a budget PC is intended for. The modern $400 machines with 4GB RAM and just about any CPU (aside from AMD Brazos or Intel Atom) are very nice in my experience. The performance for web browsing and Office stuff is not very tangibly different than a high end machine.
Gaming is a different story, but you can do more gaming on a cheap machine today than ever before.
A 64MB Celeron spent most of its time swap file thrashing on a really slow budget HDD. Apparently they also sold a 32MB version! Yikes!
In terms of RAM alone, 64 MB on a clean install of win9x shouldn't be too bad, at least if the video and HDD are also decent (and motherboard for that matter), but having a "supermarket" PC with those qualities was/is rare and (of course) the average end-user isn't going to be able to remove all the bloated crap from the default install either.
The same is true today: at home, I still use my 2 GHz turion laptop with embedded Nvidia 7150 and 2 GB of DDR2 for almost all of my normal desktop stuff. And, until a couple months ago, my family was also still using an Athlon XP 2500+ system with 1 GB DDR and WinXP SP3, and it handled most desktop tasks and web browsing fine. (in fact, most multimedia stuff ran perfectly fine too, as long as there was proper driver support catering to a CPU lacking SSE2 and supporting hardware acceleration -which is apparently no longer the case for Silverlight, hence Netflix went from running fine to being unplayable, even with a Radeon HD 3670 installed; my dad's old dual Athlon 2800 board didn't fare much better)
OTOH, it's really cheap to build a vastly faster new system too . . . for well under $200, we got a black edition 3.2 GHz Athlon II X3, 8 GB DDR3, and a blueray reader/writer, and a AM3+ motherboard (albeit a low-cost one with only 1 PCI, 1 PCIe 16x, and 1 PCI-e 1x -plus onboard AMD video).
It wouldn't take much more to push that system into a competent modern gaming rig too. (mainly a fast video card -as it is, I think we upgraded it to a Radeon HD 4350 that we already had)
