How much RAM? And what is the processor anyway?
I am guess a P3? What clock speed?

Processor is an Athlon XP 2400+ with 2 gigabytes of RAM. Not exactly a slouch system. But I guess by modern standards.....

Script heavy web sites are pretty painful. I don't think there's much that can be done about it, other than using NoScript to disable scripts by default. Restricting scripts is also good for security. A lot of today's web sites won't work at all without all their ridiculous scripts whitelisted though.
I use a win2k Tualatin machine for some internet stuff, but it's only on a few particular sites. For the internet at large it's pretty slow.

For some reason SSE2 is becoming mandatory in some strange places.
I've wondered about the viability of an SSE2 emulator, so I just searched a bit on that. I didn't find anything that was really developed, just people talking about the idea. It seems that for a CPU that doesn't support SSE2, the SSE2 instructions look like MMX instructions, so they execute but incorrectly. This complicates the idea of trying to trap them and emulate them.

You could try to install Windows Vista and disable Aero.
I managed to install Windows Vista on an XP 2000+ with 1 GB of RAM and with a similar Radeon card (think it was an X800).
It actually ran OK (so long as you just use it for normal tasks).
Only problem with the "newer" Windows operating systems (Vista and up) is that there aren't that many chipset manufacturers that made drivers for these newer operating systems (Nforce 1 & 2 and some older SIS chipsets comes to mind).
I was lucky since the particular motherboard had a VIA chipset.

I'd like someone to explain to me WHY people keep trying to browse the internet on outdated computers, and then wonder why it doesn't work. this notion that the internet should not change in its 20+ year life is baffling. Now if you CAN'T acquire a more modern machine, I'm sorry, but other than that, why subject yourself to the headache? Just because you built a 2004 computer and connected it to the internet, doesn't mean you get a 2004 internet.

luckybob wrote:

I'd like someone to explain to me WHY people keep trying to browse the internet on outdated computers, and then wonder why it doesn't work. this notion that the internet should not change in its 20+ year life is baffling. Now if you CAN'T acquire a more modern machine, I'm sorry, but other than that, why subject yourself to the headache? Just because you built a 2004 computer and connected it to the internet, doesn't mean you get a 2004 internet.

Because we can 😀

A fast Athlon XP system should handle todays internet OK...ish
I donated a Prescott 550 (3.4) system to the company I work for, its a year 2004 system and it still handles internet just fine.

Combining newer/better parts together can make a world of difference with these old systems. A 3.0+ p4 does not seem all that bad combined with even a pcie HD4650 and good ram on the modern web. Throw in an SSD and it gets even better!

Waste of an ssd, unless you are gaming, but even then, your going to be limited to the shit-tastic pci bus.

I had a DUAL cpu 2800+, it worked okay on the internet with xp. It was in the garage so it being slow was okay. But with how integrated gpu acceleration has become, i upgraded to a core 2 xeon setup and its made life so easy.

I just dont see the point

luckybob wrote:

I'd like someone to explain to me WHY people keep trying to browse the internet on outdated computers, and then wonder why it doesn't work. this notion that the internet should not change in its 20+ year life is baffling. Now if you CAN'T acquire a more modern machine, I'm sorry, but other than that, why subject yourself to the headache? Just because you built a 2004 computer and connected it to the internet, doesn't mean you get a 2004 internet.

Maybe because I remember the days of 386 computers running windows 3.1 with 4 megabytes of ram running Netscape Navigator and I have a hard time getting my mind around the fact that a 2-gigahertz computer with 2 gigabytes of RAM and a video card with 128 megabytes of memory (that's more memory that computers had for a very long time) is barely enough to get you on the internet anymore

Internet is what finally killed XP off for me. I still prefer Internet Explorer but 8 isn't up to the task any more, and even firefox didn't perform as well as my Win7 machine. Were talking about a Xeon x3320 2.50Ghz duel core CPU here so not modern but well up to the task of internet browsing.

I'm not a fan of the flash heavy internet these days but accept gone are the days of simple html web sites. People access sites on phones, ipads, PC's, TVs and whatever else the website needs to adapt to that.

I'll just quote myself (from this thread):

That's reality, unfortunately. I had to do the same with my P4 Northwood rig - a 2.4GHz CPU, 2gb of DDR-333 ram and 256mb GF6600 AGP video card just didn't cut it by 2013, ended up building my current Core i5 to replace it.

And that PC had a fully updated Windows XP SP3.

Sometimes reality has a way of making you do things you don't like - I despise cellphones, pads and other portable devices, yet I recently got myself a prepaid phone (not a smartphone 😜 ) because my local telco finally took down the last pay phones around here and I need to have some way to call back home in case of an emergency. At least this cellphone doesn't have text capabilities (yes, I made that choice) so I don't have to worry about constant messages from anyone.

JayCeeBee64 wrote:

I'll just quote myself (from this thread): […]
Show full quote

I'll just quote myself (from this thread):

That's reality, unfortunately. I had to do the same with my P4 Northwood rig - a 2.4GHz CPU, 2gb of DDR-333 ram and 256mb GF6600 AGP video card just didn't cut it by 2013, ended up building my current Core i5 to replace it.

And that PC had a fully updated Windows XP SP3.

Sometimes reality has a way of making you do things you don't like - I despise cellphones, pads and other portable devices, yet I recently got myself a prepaid phone (not a smartphone 😜 ) because my local telco finally took down the last pay phones around here and I need to have some way to call back home in case of an emergency. At least this cellphone doesn't have text capabilities (yes, I made that choice) so I don't have to worry about constant messages from anyone.

Pretty much every phone supports SMS. My old TDMA StarTAC could.

I find smartphones pretty handy myself. I don't get this petty reactionary thought.

luckybob wrote:

I'd like someone to explain to me WHY people keep trying to browse the internet on outdated computers, and then wonder why it doesn't work. this notion that the internet should not change in its 20+ year life is baffling. Now if you CAN'T acquire a more modern machine, I'm sorry, but other than that, why subject yourself to the headache? Just because you built a 2004 computer and connected it to the internet, doesn't mean you get a 2004 internet.

The problem is well known at this point, so it's not that it surprises me, but I don't feel obligated to like it or support it either.
It doesn't matter how many years have passed, the present day notion that web sites should consist of a pile of clunky scripts is baffling to me. Every web site now thinks the visitor's computer should be a blank slate for their scripters to play in, instead of a simple and reliable way to view their content at a safe distance, according to the optimal rendering already configured in the visitor's native OS and browser.
This stuff is also the source of 95% of the security problems people associate with the internet, or often attribute to the OS.

It wasn't until just a few years ago that web sites started making their scripts mandatory. Prior to that, the typical web site would still be usable even if you had their scripts disabled. I use NoScript even on my Phenom2 machine, because the web performs better that way and it's safer. I do have to fiddle with using "temporarily allow" when I visit new sites though.

Wow. This seems so similar to my case.
I have an old acer veriton 7200D with a Pentium 4 @1.6GHz. It had a creepy SiS 305 but I added a Radeon 7500LE and 1GB of ram.
For no damn reason though, it can only see 640MB... so as you could understand my choices are quite limited.

Tired of XP (which became a burden after 4 years since last format) I tried manjaro linux with LXQt, much snappier than the already lightweight (but GTK-bound) Xfce.
Anyway even though I got Office working with crossover (I desperately need Access).. I somewhat didn't enjoy the overall thingy. I mean, I had already used console a heap of times by then.. and when power went off btrfs corrupted..

So I tried Vista home basic.. which aside of stupid myths about vista's sluggishness performed well.

But I still felt it wasn't optimal.. So.. surprise surprise, I reinstalled XP.
And man, I can't believe it only uses 130MB of RAM (manjaro was 200MB and Vista 290MB) with nothing opened and with all the updates (were 110 with only SP2) edit: you can check performance tuning here
edit2: Windows Thin PC in a vm with windows basic theme and all effects disabled managed to get down to 240MB

At the moment I only installed media player classic, thunderbird and firefox.
Gosh, if it's doable. At least now I don't still feel my phone (and it's tiny screen) better than a full sized computer.

When I have to install drivers, I just manually unpack installers and give required files to windows device manager (so no additional burdensome service is installed)
I have no AV, but if I really were to use one I would avoid Avast and Bitdefender all day. Both of them are quite stupid with false positives.

EDIT: Ok, so the Radeon died. Hence I had to revive the Silicon Integrated crap. (expectedly OEM has just outdated drivers).
Very funnily I get artifacted hardware YUV conversion, and video driver crashes when I start google earth.
Now I wonder if it could have something with the fact they magically enabled DirectX8 in latest driver. Or perhaps I should just update BIOS.

IIRC you can run WINPE on systems with 128mb of RAM so if you want to try that with a 7/8 PE on that P4 then that would be a way to use a newer ver of Windows without anything extra loaded.

I would install ArchBang on it. It uses Openbox as a default WM. Very fast and lightweight. No Btrfs, though. It's not mature enough yet.

I seriously need to retire my old TUSL2-C. 512 MB of RAM definitely does not cut it. Current versions of Thunderbird are starting to choke up badly.

By the way, a new version of K-Meleon finally came out a little while ago. (It is a fine choice for a low-power system.)
http://kmeleon.sourceforge.net/

ncmark wrote:

luckybob wrote:

I'd like someone to explain to me WHY people keep trying to browse the internet on outdated computers, and then wonder why it doesn't work. this notion that the internet should not change in its 20+ year life is baffling. Now if you CAN'T acquire a more modern machine, I'm sorry, but other than that, why subject yourself to the headache? Just because you built a 2004 computer and connected it to the internet, doesn't mean you get a 2004 internet.

Maybe because I remember the days of 386 computers running windows 3.1 with 4 megabytes of ram running Netscape Navigator and I have a hard time getting my mind around the fact that a 2-gigahertz computer with 2 gigabytes of RAM and a video card with 128 megabytes of memory (that's more memory that computers had for a very long time) is barely enough to get you on the internet anymore

Its called bloat. Bling over functionality. It's all part of "modern design"

Posting this from a MSI 478 system w/ a mobile 3.06ghz/512/533 HT P4 running fully updated windows xp sp3, an HD4670 (temporary overkill) and 2gb of DDR400. Not the fastest thing in the world but most of the slowdowns I notice are due to the old IDE hard drive. Things are not as snappy and take a little bit to load compared to a newer dual core machine but not painful by any means. Been chatting with friends on Facebook and even playing World Of Tanks on minimum settings at a constant 20+fps 😎