A thing i love about Retro PC freaks is that they quite uniformly agree. I'm proud to be in one of the worst bunch of freaks. The worst part about being one is the constant frustration of getting something to work. And when it works noticing that yep that was the fun part what do i do with the thing now that it works.. We may already be in the special place in hell. This is it.
Hardware limitations used to make it a necessity to use less system resources. Modern computer hardware has become so powerful that optimization sometimes gets thrown out the window.
I remember being so psyched that my HP Touchpad could support Flash in its browser back in 2012, because that meant I could watch RUclips on my tablet. Which was AMAZING.
@@twooey8232No, they were good, bright times. I had 500MHz single core laptop way into early 2010s and it ran RUclips perfectly, just like every website. Now we need semi-tractor engines for passenger cars - dark times.
I had 2009 Dell with Windows in a conked out state. Display, KB, BIOS nothing working, also giving weird beeps. I opened the case and removed and reinserted RAM sticks, suddenly it started booting in to windows. But when I tried entering BIOS with external KB and Monitor. Dell logo and Bios just didn't show up, directly boots to Windows. So I bought a SATA SSD and inserted it in to a slightly newer Dell machine, installed linux mint on it and replaced the old dells HDD with this SSD. To my surprise every hardware that worked with windows started working with Linux. Wifi, full hd monitor, wireless mouse. It can almost play full hd RUclips. I am happy.
depending if your gpu handles hardware acceleration it should be able to play 720p, I am using Geforce 9400M which need to use a media player to get hardware acceleration to work
There is an interesting little trick that Classilla uses on Mac OS 9 to reduce memory usage; it spoofs being a mobile browser to get rid of a lot of the bloat on modern websites and allow you to read the content. You can probably do something like that on PC's with Linux or BSD. I actually went to the extent of making a web page in HTML 4.0 running on my internal network so that I can download vintage software from my software library from Netscape 4.77 on some very old Macintosh computers. Nice video!
Single core performance gains just ain't what they used to be. There's less than a decade separating the 286 and the Pentium, yet the latter is at least an order of magnitude faster than the former. Fast-forward a few decades, and an i7-14700 might be twice as fast as an i7-7700 at single-threaded applications despite the seven year gap that separates them. It's kinda nice, actually. You can get a decade of service out of a PC before it's completely obsolete, which would've been unimaginable in the 90s.
i am still using a 2009 iMac but noticed that it is mostly hardware failure that keeps it from functioning as i owned a 2008 Dell vostro 1400 the hdd is dying but other hardware is working
really depends on the hardware. planned obsolescence aside, different price points will typically fail at different times - ie top-end hardware will last much longer than a crappy chromebook. oldest hardware I have that still functions is an hp 9480m - 10+ years old though I had to replace the keyboard on it last year.
Current mainline browsers require more than one CPU core/thread. It is something Supermium hopes to address. After that it will technically be possible to visit any site on i686 architecture machines.
Thank you I'm glad you enjoyed it! Also I agree that Linux is a fun way to breathe some new life into these old machines aside from the typical retro use.
At 6:30 when you mentioned moving to something with a bit more power I was expecting something with PowerPC given the era of machines you were working with. Maybe I've just grown too used to RUclipsrs throwing puns around. 😀
yeah, the internet was pretty different back in the day. I remember finding a website in the early 90s that had some embedded audio on it which I later learned was DJ Mark Farina's Mushroom Jazz compilation - it's what turned me on to downtempo electronic jazz.
recently i used my p4 pc exclusively for a week, went online on it and stuff. I was kinda surprised how usable it still is. Even streaming music worked with an app called spotifyxp. I ran windows xp and void linux on it and both ran pretty ok. It has a p4 northwood 3 ghz and 1 gb of ram
I've got an old p4. Mine is 1.5ghz 256mb ram williamete. Do you recommend a browser for xp I'd love to fire it up for a browse. It served me well as a kid during the MSn and limewire days.
@@HA05GER You could try Firefox ESR 52.9.0 as well. Just remember if you're going to put XP online make sure to isolate it from the rest of your network. It has some pretty nasty unpatched vulnerabilities.
Yeah the internet peaked between 1999-2010. Using the web was more interesting when it was more decentralized. Reddit and other forms of social media make things very accessible, but communicating on them feels much less personal than all the weird little hobby forums we had on the early internet.
You talking about the heatsink on the Pentium II? It is kind of wild looking but it's the stock one that came with almost all the Slot 1 CPUs back in the day.
Cool vid and yeah old computers really don't like the modern internet specially browsing. As a hobby still using my Amiga 1200 from 1992 and it's connected to the internet, it also knows how to deal with SSL, the A1200 is not standard anymore by any means. It's a pretty mean lean oldskool machine, there's also a port of Netsurf 3.10 available for M68K and loads the en.wikipedia page in about 8 sec. You can slot in a CPU accelerator board on the A1200's edge connector, mine has a PiStorm32 CPU card with Raspberry Pi CM4 overclocked at 2.2Ghz. The CM4 runs a nifty little bare metal Motorola 68K CPU JIT emulator that identifies itself as being a 68040 CPU to the Amiga and with native Amiga drivers it also possible to use the 2GB of RAM on it, the SD card controller, the VideoCore VI gfx (it runs the Amiga desktop in 1080P 32bit color with no effort at all) and we even have native driver for the wifi on the pi with WPA2 support. So can you surf the net on a 33 year old computer ? well yes but don't expect too much from it 😀
Some Pentium M machines can run Windows 7. I have an old HP nc6120 with 60GB IDE HDD and 1.5GB DDR1. It used to have less ram but i upgraded it. That old machine runs Windows 7 and all the drivers work fine, although i did need to manually install the graphics driver through device manager Just too bad that it does not support Windows Aero. I use it for older devices and software that require older versions of Windows. That thing just refuses to die, the screen has some vertical lines but it is still usable for most things. The battery is also still holding about an hour of charge somehow.
I have an old computer with Celeron 300A, 512MB of SDRAM, and GeForce 2 MX 400. The motherboard is a mix of AT and ATX standard too, which is nice to see. It runs Windows 98 and can actually access internet, even though I have to use old browsers. Is it good? Nope. But certain websites are accessible, and it's not all that bad speed-wise. If I was forced to use it as my main PC, I would be able to, even if it would be pretty slow and wouldn't be able to stream videos.
I have a slot-1 PIII running at 650Mhz, Ali chipset [1999] 5 PCI, 1 AGP, 1 ISA , 768Mb SDRAM/133, geForceMX-440-64MB RAM [new heatsink and Fan added 2008], PCI SATA x 2, PCI USB2.0 x 5, ISA SoundBlaster CT2950, TVCapture card, NIC 10/100... And WindowsXP Pro-SP3., WMP11, Klitecodec-Mega, MyPAL Browser, AVG-2019., SATA 2 x 1 TB HDD, Zip250 3.5, and Card reader, 550W PSU. CRT 17" @1280 x 1080. Used for Mainly MAME/Final Burn/ Emulator, Mp3's, some Music Videos, DVD Player/Burner. Full tower and heavy AF!
My 200mhz Pentium with Windows 95 (OSR 2.5) has been successfully running the K-Meleon web browser to connect to the "modern" internet with TLS support and JavaScript for about a year now. It barely works lol. Even with all sorts of optimizations, my download speeds with a wired connection top out around 150kbps (presumably due to the processor speed itself acting as a bottleneck, my connection is much faster) and some websites won't fully load correctly, but I was able to get on Facebook and post a status from Windows 95, so that feels like enough of a win for a weirdo like me.
Messing with older computers can be fun. Since I’m a ham and need software to program my older radios. older windows moto software will work as long as it is win 7 32bit ultimate. 600mhz cpu and only 512mb of ram. That was my slowest radio programming laptop. Actually watching videos and browsing ya that was slow as hell. But Firefox worked and worked well.
You said about CPU and RAM, but how important is to have hardware accelerated graphics? Such tasks as page scrolling theoretically can be delegated to GPU, freeing CPU for more important things. However, for it to work, browser and OS should be capable of sending proper commands to specific videocard, so it may be not easy to find right combination which works correctly.
That is a fair point! Like you said it might be hard to find a video card modern enough to know how to use hardware acceleration properly. Really old machines seem to pretty much rely on the CPU/software acceleration completely.
@@DOSStorm I searched more about it and looks like browsers started to use hardware acceleration seriously since 2010. I know that some browsers used 2D acceleration before that, but looks like you are right overall.
I know but on the display is sticker with compaq armada e500 and in bios is compaq armada v300. This is what i have i.ebayimg.com/images/g/hmgAAOSw~G9j3xWg/s-l1600.jpg
I thought there's a hack to allow Windows 10 or later to run on any CPU? Would it have worked on another of your PCs in the video? Would have been interesting to see what browsing would be like on the stock OS already installed on those PCs.
I know you can bypass the requirements but I imagine Windows 10 on 128MB of RAM with a slow single core CPU would be pretty rough. It might be fun to try though.
Not any CPU. At minimum the CPU must support the necessary instruction set. This also doesn't fix programs that might require those instruction set as well.
I do love modern hardware, I like that my phone's power brick has more CPU power than my first pc. And intent so fast I would fill that same pcs hard drive many times over in the time it's taken me to write this. But dam it's made software developers lazy
@@DOSStorm it probably uses software acceleration which uses the CPU which it already does. You probably need to stream it via a media player not on a browser to get a better experience.
Oh my god yes. You can squeeze a bit. Not amazing but yeah. Actually kind of a little hobby of mine. I had OpenBSD running on a mid-2000s Celeron and it was actually pretty capable (with 2G of RAM mind you). Even more rich (non-multimedia) sites worked great (but slow to load). RUclips was a slideshow but perhaps part was lack of acceleration. The OS and lightweight desktop actually felt lightning fast. But a few years ago, I actually got an eMac from 2003 or so working pretty well for *very light* tasks. Used it for games and distraction free writing but would take it through its paces online. Actually would use it to browse RUclips and had a downloader to actually watch. Shit designed for the era (like Macintosh Garden) was great. Reddit (old version) and mobile RUclips were useable. With XP, I have a 2004 or so P3 laptop with a more modern browser fork (MyPal). 512 MB of RAM was a bottleneck for too many graphics. It actually performed liked your powerhouse before the RAM upgrade. I have a soft spot for doing things on godawfully outdated or underpowered machines.
For whatever reason I too sort of get a kick out of banging square pegs into round holes by using old systems with modern things. Its never really about whether you should... it's if you can. 😜
i am using a freebsd on a mid 2009 iMac 8GB RAM I would say it would start becoming an issue when you start using heavy application like Chromium which starts eating your swap space so you need to restart it every so often but core 2 duos are pretty much the standard for baseline daily tasks
@@zhongj Although running full, fat Chromium is asking for it. Qutebrowser or Netsurf ran decent and would tap Firefox in a pinch. Would not consider it as a go to web browsing experience (since it was so old and underpowered) but still surprising you can do as much as you can.
@@pixelheresy I run on a pretty lightweight system FreeBSD so I wouldn't be able to run on Windows 11 just from everything that it's trying to do for the system. you can disable certain features in Chromium to make it more managable.
Last time I tried to connect a retro machine (Pentium 233 MMX, from around 1996/1997) a few years ago, it somewhat worked. I cheated and used a NIC through a legacy router, but a lot of content wasn't available.
I see these and wonder: what about links/linx the terminal based “modern” web browser? Sure you can’t see images but that isn’t the point of taking very old systems online most of the time.
swapping is usually good for SSD which has faster process than HDD but generally means you need more RAM for your tasks or restart applications eating the memory. One good indicator of failure is when your swap is being used entire system become so slow the drive need to go.
wow & the CPU cooler is 100% silent ... imagine that today ... Yes most versions of the real Opera (before it got chromed in v15 ) worked without SSE2, I used Opera vom 7.xx to 12.xx even on an Athlon-XP (that lacked many extensions incl. the SSE ones)
@@DOSStorm - Yes, No. 1 noise maker was the HDD & even worse CD (remember CD games with "copy protection") ... followed by a cheap power supply or cheap user added case fans ... My first PC was Windows 95B in 1997 (stright with first ATX & 2 USB 1.x ports) ... P.S. most versions of the real Opera (before it got chromed in v15 ) worked without SSE2, I used Opera vom 7.xx to 12.xx even on an Athlon-XP (that lacked many extensions compared to a Pentium-4 incl. the SSE ones)
I wouldn't consider a Pentium II 333MHz an "early 90s" system.... That CPU came out in 1998. By that time, cable internet was available. I was in a 10Mbit down / 1Mbit up cable internet connection 98.
It would be a fun experiment to see what would happen in an isolated environment. However, I would think most modern malware wouldn't even know what to do with a Windows 95 computer.
God I wish I could go back. The bombardment of the stupidest things the current internet pushes and the garbage it tries to force run on your PC, I lost a lot of interest in PC's in the recent years. Back then it was much more simple and pure and interesting. Since a lot of people used unique ways to make their content pop and also had the care to make sure it works well with most peoples computers since hardware limitation is a very conscious thing. These days it's run by soulless faceless corporations that shit out garbage software and if it didn't work, everyone would just say buy new hardware. Like it's your fault that their junk doesn't run. Everything is so incredibly standardized today there shouldn't need to be ridiculous hardware to run the internet and programs well, should be fine with mediocre hardware.
Running a modern web browser on an old computer completely defeats the point of this test. I have tried it using an old computer and a similarly old browser (1999) and the answer is... yes, but... it's busted asf. Only some pages will load at all. Most are broken in various ways.
It depends on what you're trying to accomplish. If you want to use an old browser like IE4 or Netscape, you can setup a WRP server to render pages remotely and display them as pictures with clickable image mapping.
@@DOSStormit would be interesting to see a continuation of this video of when you are able to keep upgrading the machine that is usable for daily tasks.
I would say that is probably the bare minimum for a modern machine, but you would be surprised how many people are still kicking around with 4GB of RAM. As for everything in this video, its obviously just impractical fun torturing poor old computers with the modern web.
@@DOSStorm 4GB RAM is doable depending how lightweight the OS for example I use BSD on my Vostro 1400 4GB DDR2 RAM until recently that the hdd gave out when the system froze upon swapping after switching to Ubuntu ESM
people sticks to what they have but if you are gonna go buy one then yes you want to get the most value so you should pick a modern CPU and higher RAM minimum 16GB
From the title: Yeah I just did it yesterday. I installed Linux mint on a laptop with a broken screen, one broken usb port, and no internal hard drive. It is now a media server
I mean, technically the operating system is on a thumb drive. But that little fucker is never coming out of the laptop Because without it there is no storage
In the last 6 months I've been upgrading laptops and PCs for friends and family by installing Linux (Debian XFce for too old pcs (between 500 and 1000 passmark cpu points), Linux Mint for newer ones (over 1000 Passmark CPU points)). For a minimally acceptable experience with Linux and the internet, you need a computer not older than 11-15 years ago (11 years if the machine was low end, 15 years if the machine was high end at the time of the purchase). I personally don't bother with any cpu with less than 500 passmark points, because youtube won't run properly on such pcs on anything other than 360p, and youtube is the no1 need these days online. Minimum to work properly is 4 GB of RAM too. Yes, you can install a lightweight Debian DE with 2 GB of RAM, but that won't allow you to open more than 1 tab on Chrome or Firefox. Even with 4 GB, too many tabs open at the same time will send you to swap. Don't get hang up on lightweight DEs that don't use more than 100 or 400 MBs of RAM. The moment a browser opens (especially Firefox which is a hog), your RAM will be eaten for lunch. Anything slower than the specs that I suggest, it's an exercise in futility, given my experience. No one would want to actually use these computers without a minimum of these specs. Even my 10 year old niece commented that it was "slow sometimes" (I gave her a DELL laptop that its cpu scores 500 points, with Debian XFce, and 4 GB of RAM).
@@nihonam There's noscript for Firefox, and chrome. However, in this day and age, without Js, websites don't even load. NoScript was very popular extension back in the late 2000s, when websites didn't base their sites extensively on JS. After 2015, things changed. These days, the best way to avoid the RAM consumption is to use something like Opera Mini (if available on your platform), because that one is loading websites on Opera's servers, they re-process it to remove the JS in a way that makes sense, and then serve you a simpler webpage.
most younger gens uses phones the apps are more responsive with current hardware so it will feel different to a PC I have in 2009 dealing with delays. Playing youtube videos depends on if your GPU supports hardware acceleration on it for example my Geforce 9400M wont work on browsers but can use media player to offload video processing
@@DOSStormDRM is for RUclips movies if it just a channel video then it will work but i think you might need to install ffmpeg on your system for the codecs
There's a special place in hell for these Retro PC freaks. It's the equivalent of someone getting all nostalgic about the DMV.
Yeah, those types of people are the worst.
@@DOSStorm *looks over at WinXP computer rebuilt to play old Win3.1 games...* Yep, they be.
9:09 My First Laptop! So Nostalgic man
A thing i love about Retro PC freaks is that they quite uniformly agree. I'm proud to be in one of the worst bunch of freaks.
The worst part about being one is the constant frustration of getting something to work. And when it works noticing that yep that was the fun part what do i do with the thing now that it works..
We may already be in the special place in hell. This is it.
@@acubley Looks at my 8 XP builds LOL
Frogfind is a huge help for old computers, it strips down all the modern stuff and make it work with old hardware
Frogfind is cool, but I was more interested to see what I could get away with using normal browsing methods.
0:57 I thought I'm the only one feeling this....modern software bloated, modern games bloated,modern web bloated....everything modern is bloated
Hardware limitations used to make it a necessity to use less system resources. Modern computer hardware has become so powerful that optimization sometimes gets thrown out the window.
@@DOSStorm do you plan to make videos about that? I have been reading about Electron apps vs PWA
Latest Windows release: "PLEASE. OH GOD PLEASE JUST LET US AUTO-START TEN MORE SERVICES."
@@DOSStorm Indeed, I had to get a refund for Steamworld Heist 2, an indie game, because the devs did not want to do the optimization phase as much
I totally forgot that youtube use to use flash. My memory isn't what it used to be lol.
I remember being so psyched that my HP Touchpad could support Flash in its browser back in 2012, because that meant I could watch RUclips on my tablet. Which was AMAZING.
everything used flash before HTML5
@talvisota327 I was there before RUclips. Before Google. In the dark times.
@@twooey8232No, they were good, bright times. I had 500MHz single core laptop way into early 2010s and it ran RUclips perfectly, just like every website. Now we need semi-tractor engines for passenger cars - dark times.
I had 2009 Dell with Windows in a conked out state. Display, KB, BIOS nothing working, also giving weird beeps. I opened the case and removed and reinserted RAM sticks, suddenly it started booting in to windows.
But when I tried entering BIOS with external KB and Monitor. Dell logo and Bios just didn't show up, directly boots to Windows. So I bought a SATA SSD and inserted it in to a slightly newer Dell machine, installed linux mint on it and replaced the old dells HDD with this SSD. To my surprise every hardware that worked with windows started working with Linux. Wifi, full hd monitor, wireless mouse. It can almost play full hd RUclips. I am happy.
depending if your gpu handles hardware acceleration it should be able to play 720p, I am using Geforce 9400M which need to use a media player to get hardware acceleration to work
10:11: Was not expecting you to literally throw RAM at the problem! 🤣😹
"That'll do it"
There is an interesting little trick that Classilla uses on Mac OS 9 to reduce memory usage; it spoofs being a mobile browser to get rid of a lot of the bloat on modern websites and allow you to read the content. You can probably do something like that on PC's with Linux or BSD. I actually went to the extent of making a web page in HTML 4.0 running on my internal network so that I can download vintage software from my software library from Netscape 4.77 on some very old Macintosh computers.
Nice video!
Single core performance gains just ain't what they used to be. There's less than a decade separating the 286 and the Pentium, yet the latter is at least an order of magnitude faster than the former. Fast-forward a few decades, and an i7-14700 might be twice as fast as an i7-7700 at single-threaded applications despite the seven year gap that separates them. It's kinda nice, actually. You can get a decade of service out of a PC before it's completely obsolete, which would've been unimaginable in the 90s.
i am still using a 2009 iMac but noticed that it is mostly hardware failure that keeps it from functioning as i owned a 2008 Dell vostro 1400 the hdd is dying but other hardware is working
100%. A 2012 PC is far more usable today than a 2000 PC was in 2012.
really depends on the hardware. planned obsolescence aside, different price points will typically fail at different times - ie top-end hardware will last much longer than a crappy chromebook.
oldest hardware I have that still functions is an hp 9480m - 10+ years old though I had to replace the keyboard on it last year.
Blue Glowy media buttons for the win!
Gotta love that 2003 blue!
In 1994 I built a web site for a large client and it fit on a 1.44 mb floppy drive. I still have it.
nice, stuff like that is always cool!
Nice! Good luck fitting any modern website on a single floppy. lol
Current mainline browsers require more than one CPU core/thread. It is something Supermium hopes to address. After that it will technically be possible to visit any site on i686 architecture machines.
I had Dillo running on a 1993 computer using NetBSD. It had a 100MHz Pentium and 128MB FPM memory.
this video made my day, easy fun and interesting . Loved every second of it! Nostalgic and Linux is awesome for these kinda things.
Thank you I'm glad you enjoyed it! Also I agree that Linux is a fun way to breathe some new life into these old machines aside from the typical retro use.
TinyCore though was a good pick, there's not much info on it on RUclips
At 6:30 when you mentioned moving to something with a bit more power I was expecting something with PowerPC given the era of machines you were working with. Maybe I've just grown too used to RUclipsrs throwing puns around. 😀
yeah, the internet was pretty different back in the day. I remember finding a website in the early 90s that had some embedded audio on it which I later learned was DJ Mark Farina's Mushroom Jazz compilation - it's what turned me on to downtempo electronic jazz.
Look mom I made it on to DOS Storm 5:27! Wasn’t expecting to see my early iteration of Pro Tools rig building on this episode
Ha! I was wondering if you would notice.
@ I usually check in on Saturday morning to see if I’ve missed any of your videos, somehow it took me 4 months to find this one lol.
recently i used my p4 pc exclusively for a week, went online on it and stuff. I was kinda surprised how usable it still is. Even streaming music worked with an app called spotifyxp. I ran windows xp and void linux on it and both ran pretty ok. It has a p4 northwood 3 ghz and 1 gb of ram
I've got an old p4. Mine is 1.5ghz 256mb ram williamete. Do you recommend a browser for xp I'd love to fire it up for a browse. It served me well as a kid during the MSn and limewire days.
@@HA05GER i used k-meleon but idk if that pc will be good enough, it will probably be slightly better than the pentium 3 shown in the video
@@sparki_ cheers I'll give it ago.
@@HA05GER You could try Firefox ESR 52.9.0 as well. Just remember if you're going to put XP online make sure to isolate it from the rest of your network. It has some pretty nasty unpatched vulnerabilities.
@@DOSStorm cheers I'll give it ago. Yeh before I just hotspot it via my phone so not perfect but isolated from everything else.
I hate the internet today, I loved it in 2010
Yeah the internet peaked between 1999-2010. Using the web was more interesting when it was more decentralized. Reddit and other forms of social media make things very accessible, but communicating on them feels much less personal than all the weird little hobby forums we had on the early internet.
Wikipedia in mobile mode is usually a better experience too.
Good point! I find that Wikipedia is a well optimized website that can at least "kind of" work on most old devices.
Now that is a heatsink!
You talking about the heatsink on the Pentium II? It is kind of wild looking but it's the stock one that came with almost all the Slot 1 CPUs back in the day.
@@DOSStorm yes that's the one just a bent up slab of aluminum
@@upgrade1373 I mean it has fins....Kinda.
Never seen those fins @@DOSStorm
@@DOSStormI've only seen ones with fans
That's actually pretty interesting.
Cool vid and yeah old computers really don't like the modern internet specially browsing.
As a hobby still using my Amiga 1200 from 1992 and it's connected to the internet, it also knows how to deal with SSL, the A1200 is not standard anymore by any means.
It's a pretty mean lean oldskool machine, there's also a port of Netsurf 3.10 available for M68K and loads the en.wikipedia page in about 8 sec.
You can slot in a CPU accelerator board on the A1200's edge connector, mine has a PiStorm32 CPU card with Raspberry Pi CM4 overclocked at 2.2Ghz.
The CM4 runs a nifty little bare metal Motorola 68K CPU JIT emulator that identifies itself as being a 68040 CPU to the Amiga and with native Amiga drivers it also possible to use the 2GB of RAM on it, the SD card controller, the VideoCore VI gfx (it runs the Amiga desktop in 1080P 32bit color with no effort at all) and we even have native driver for the wifi on the pi with WPA2 support.
So can you surf the net on a 33 year old computer ? well yes but don't expect too much from it 😀
I used the "Tiny Core Linux" distribution more than 10 years ago on an IBM ThinkPad with 128MB RAM (can't remember the model).
It interesting that even just 10 years ago some of these machines would have been far more usable online than they are now.
Glad to see the Pentium M is still kicking!
The real question is if you can still surf the internet with a 2025 computer.
Not without an ad blocker. lol
Hell I used Windows XP up untill the very last minute.
Some Pentium M machines can run Windows 7.
I have an old HP nc6120 with 60GB IDE HDD and 1.5GB DDR1.
It used to have less ram but i upgraded it.
That old machine runs Windows 7 and all the drivers work fine,
although i did need to manually install the graphics driver through device manager
Just too bad that it does not support Windows Aero.
I use it for older devices and software that require older versions of Windows.
That thing just refuses to die, the screen has some vertical lines but it is still usable for most things.
The battery is also still holding about an hour of charge somehow.
it was like a 1950s car with moddern gear...
Throw a Windows 98 PC at the modern web next time. That will be a short video.
kernelex + firefox 52 isnt completely unusable
I have an old computer with Celeron 300A, 512MB of SDRAM, and GeForce 2 MX 400. The motherboard is a mix of AT and ATX standard too, which is nice to see. It runs Windows 98 and can actually access internet, even though I have to use old browsers. Is it good? Nope. But certain websites are accessible, and it's not all that bad speed-wise. If I was forced to use it as my main PC, I would be able to, even if it would be pretty slow and wouldn't be able to stream videos.
I have a slot-1 PIII running at 650Mhz, Ali chipset [1999] 5 PCI, 1 AGP, 1 ISA , 768Mb SDRAM/133, geForceMX-440-64MB RAM [new heatsink and Fan added 2008], PCI SATA x 2, PCI USB2.0 x 5, ISA SoundBlaster CT2950, TVCapture card, NIC 10/100... And WindowsXP Pro-SP3., WMP11, Klitecodec-Mega, MyPAL Browser, AVG-2019., SATA 2 x 1 TB HDD, Zip250 3.5, and Card reader, 550W PSU. CRT 17" @1280 x 1080. Used for Mainly MAME/Final Burn/ Emulator, Mp3's, some Music Videos, DVD Player/Burner. Full tower and heavy AF!
Ok I guy with a "metallica beard" as we called them back in the 90's needs a thumb up. 😎
"Toilet Paper - Link" 😆❤
- I think I'm just going to go right ahead and adopt that "puppy" from now on 🤣
Haha I've been calling those Toilet Paper links to my friends for years. They aren't horrible for the price.
@@DOSStorm Well, good or bad... everybody do need some TP for their bungholes... heheheh heheheh heheheh!
My 200mhz Pentium with Windows 95 (OSR 2.5) has been successfully running the K-Meleon web browser to connect to the "modern" internet with TLS support and JavaScript for about a year now. It barely works lol. Even with all sorts of optimizations, my download speeds with a wired connection top out around 150kbps (presumably due to the processor speed itself acting as a bottleneck, my connection is much faster) and some websites won't fully load correctly, but I was able to get on Facebook and post a status from Windows 95, so that feels like enough of a win for a weirdo like me.
There is a bit of bittersweet irony here, a old PC is able to access the internet more accurately than the damn PSP!
9:11 damn, I was given one of these in 2017, I ran XP Embedded POSReady on it, it sounds great and was actually half decent for N64 emulation!
2:28 "only cheese"🗿
You better brie-lieve it!
@@DOSStorm fr💀
Interesting thank you for sharing
Very cool! I was hoping you would try to use AiM, the AoL instant messaging system.
Messing with older computers can be fun. Since I’m a ham and need software to program my older radios. older windows moto software will work as long as it is win 7 32bit ultimate. 600mhz cpu and only 512mb of ram. That was my slowest radio programming laptop. Actually watching videos and browsing ya that was slow as hell. But Firefox worked and worked well.
SSE3 and TLS1.3 are the main blockers of internet on legacy systems. Distros ending 32-bit support is also a big issue.
It should not be too difficult to recompile open source browser for older CPUs.
debian 12 is supported on a pentium ii
Cool video.
You said about CPU and RAM, but how important is to have hardware accelerated graphics?
Such tasks as page scrolling theoretically can be delegated to GPU, freeing CPU for more important things.
However, for it to work, browser and OS should be capable of sending proper commands to specific videocard, so it may be not easy to find right combination which works correctly.
That is a fair point! Like you said it might be hard to find a video card modern enough to know how to use hardware acceleration properly. Really old machines seem to pretty much rely on the CPU/software acceleration completely.
@@DOSStorm I searched more about it and looks like browsers started to use hardware acceleration seriously since 2010. I know that some browsers used 2D acceleration before that, but looks like you are right overall.
I also have Compaq Armada E500, but older model
Really? What CPU does it have?
It has intel celeron 446 but I found out its actually a compaq armada v300 with a swapped display from an e500😅
@vasekcz230 In your defense, the chassis looks almost if not completely identical. lol
I know but on the display is sticker with compaq armada e500 and in bios is compaq armada v300. This is what i have i.ebayimg.com/images/g/hmgAAOSw~G9j3xWg/s-l1600.jpg
Maybe is just the motherboard replaced
I thought there's a hack to allow Windows 10 or later to run on any CPU? Would it have worked on another of your PCs in the video? Would have been interesting to see what browsing would be like on the stock OS already installed on those PCs.
I know you can bypass the requirements but I imagine Windows 10 on 128MB of RAM with a slow single core CPU would be pretty rough. It might be fun to try though.
i was able to bypass the cpu requirement for core m 5y10 cpu from the low clock speed
Not any CPU. At minimum the CPU must support the necessary instruction set. This also doesn't fix programs that might require those instruction set as well.
i have that same exact case sitting in the basement
I do love modern hardware, I like that my phone's power brick has more CPU power than my first pc. And intent so fast I would fill that same pcs hard drive many times over in the time it's taken me to write this. But dam it's made software developers lazy
You might be able to get Firefox to stream video on the Pentium M by using the H264ify extension. I doubt it would work too well, but it might work.
Worth a try. My guess is it will run like crap. lol
@@DOSStorm it probably uses software acceleration which uses the CPU which it already does. You probably need to stream it via a media player not on a browser to get a better experience.
Oh my god yes. You can squeeze a bit. Not amazing but yeah. Actually kind of a little hobby of mine.
I had OpenBSD running on a mid-2000s Celeron and it was actually pretty capable (with 2G of RAM mind you). Even more rich (non-multimedia) sites worked great (but slow to load). RUclips was a slideshow but perhaps part was lack of acceleration. The OS and lightweight desktop actually felt lightning fast.
But a few years ago, I actually got an eMac from 2003 or so working pretty well for *very light* tasks. Used it for games and distraction free writing but would take it through its paces online. Actually would use it to browse RUclips and had a downloader to actually watch. Shit designed for the era (like Macintosh Garden) was great. Reddit (old version) and mobile RUclips were useable.
With XP, I have a 2004 or so P3 laptop with a more modern browser fork (MyPal). 512 MB of RAM was a bottleneck for too many graphics. It actually performed liked your powerhouse before the RAM upgrade.
I have a soft spot for doing things on godawfully outdated or underpowered machines.
For whatever reason I too sort of get a kick out of banging square pegs into round holes by using old systems with modern things. Its never really about whether you should... it's if you can. 😜
i am using a freebsd on a mid 2009 iMac 8GB RAM I would say it would start becoming an issue when you start using heavy application like Chromium which starts eating your swap space so you need to restart it every so often but core 2 duos are pretty much the standard for baseline daily tasks
@@zhongj Although running full, fat Chromium is asking for it.
Qutebrowser or Netsurf ran decent and would tap Firefox in a pinch. Would not consider it as a go to web browsing experience (since it was so old and underpowered) but still surprising you can do as much as you can.
@@pixelheresy I run on a pretty lightweight system FreeBSD so I wouldn't be able to run on Windows 11 just from everything that it's trying to do for the system. you can disable certain features in Chromium to make it more managable.
Q4OS and Porteus Linux run well on old PCs, also.
Thanks for the recommendations!
Last time I tried to connect a retro machine (Pentium 233 MMX, from around 1996/1997) a few years ago, it somewhat worked. I cheated and used a NIC through a legacy router, but a lot of content wasn't available.
Yeah HTML5 really makes it tricky/demanding to load most sites. Most web browsers expect CPUs with SSE2 or higher as well.
I see these and wonder: what about links/linx the terminal based “modern” web browser? Sure you can’t see images but that isn’t the point of taking very old systems online most of the time.
Oh hi Lemmy! 😄
THE ACE OF SPADES!
@@DOSStorm one of the best pages of early 2000's internet, by the way! 😄
Did you have swap enabled during your tests?
Disk Io is slow on these old machines, but Linux appreciates swap for offloading unused memory
No, I didn't set up a swap.
swapping is usually good for SSD which has faster process than HDD but generally means you need more RAM for your tasks or restart applications eating the memory. One good indicator of failure is when your swap is being used entire system become so slow the drive need to go.
More Linux, vintage and retro systems enthusiasts should try T2 SDE Linux, developed by René Rebe for the last 25 years.
Never heard of it. I'll check it out, thanks for the suggestion!
25 is a quite young age for a internet capable computer. You can even use the internet with a 35 yo system.
10:50 Try to force H.264 from extensions.
wow & the CPU cooler is 100% silent ... imagine that today ...
Yes most versions of the real Opera (before it got chromed in v15 ) worked without SSE2, I used Opera vom 7.xx to 12.xx even on an Athlon-XP (that lacked many extensions incl. the SSE ones)
@@Killerspieler0815 Oddly enough, most of the noise you get from old systems comes from the hard drive.
@@DOSStorm -
Yes, No. 1 noise maker was the HDD & even worse CD (remember CD games with "copy protection") ... followed by a cheap power supply or cheap user added case fans ...
My first PC was Windows 95B in 1997 (stright with first ATX & 2 USB 1.x ports) ...
P.S. most versions of the real Opera (before it got chromed in v15 ) worked without SSE2, I used Opera vom 7.xx to 12.xx even on an Athlon-XP (that lacked many extensions compared to a Pentium-4 incl. the SSE ones)
How does your Armada's battery hold up? My 1750 has 1hr on each battery.
It still held a charge last time I used it about a year ago! I normally don't leave it attached though.
@@DOSStorm Nice - durable little buggers ;)
@@the_kombinator Yeah I love this thing! Such a great laptop in so many ways.
@@DOSStorm I've taken mine to Korea and Poland on extended vacations as a portable gaming rig. Mostly HOMM II :D
Tak w przegladarce w3m w seodowisku tekstowym
i got an 1999 imac g3 at it does surf the web just a bit slow
i used a dual pentium 4 based xeon workstation with windows xp and mypal browser and youtube worked on it
once you move to a modern OS then things probably wont work as well
So you are not using an older IDE hard drive, but a CF card? Compact Flash?
It's a Startech IDE CF reader. Makes it easy to switch OSs quickly and is more reliable than old spinning rust.
I wouldn't consider a Pentium II 333MHz an "early 90s" system.... That CPU came out in 1998. By that time, cable internet was available. I was in a 10Mbit down / 1Mbit up cable internet connection 98.
Linux Mint XFCE ---- adoro !!!
read the arch wiki for zRAM, it gives you more RAM
CPU does not think so
IE4 on Win95 will get so infected & crash...
It would be a fun experiment to see what would happen in an isolated environment. However, I would think most modern malware wouldn't even know what to do with a Windows 95 computer.
Security by obscurity (or obsolescence XD)
It won't, like bro tf you getting this info from? 💀
0:58 , I don't actually agree. Some websites (like RUclips sometimes) can easily bog down a modern system.
Why not use FreeDOS with Lynx v2.9.1 (new release in 2024) and TCP-IP? No need for windoze or Linux.
Or Arachne...Heh. Could be fun to try another time.
RUclips didn't work with Firefox probably because you forgot to activate DRM at Firefox settings
But youtube doesn't use DRM.
Ok but what's up with those cheese pics? Hook us up
You Gouda subscribe to see those.
My Pentium 4 Fujitsu Siemens PC worked with 360p youtube videos
The Pentium 4 seems to be about the bare minimum intel chip you can still sort of use the internet with. The more RAM the better though.
@@DOSStorm i added 2GB of DDR memory to it (edit wrong ram)
@@DOSStorm i own a 64 bit pentium 4 cpu but don't have a motherboard for it
@@DOSStorm i dont think pentium m can play 480p videos as I remember having that cpu from a 2005 laptop Sony VGN B100B and didnt bold well.
God I wish I could go back. The bombardment of the stupidest things the current internet pushes and the garbage it tries to force run on your PC, I lost a lot of interest in PC's in the recent years. Back then it was much more simple and pure and interesting. Since a lot of people used unique ways to make their content pop and also had the care to make sure it works well with most peoples computers since hardware limitation is a very conscious thing.
These days it's run by soulless faceless corporations that shit out garbage software and if it didn't work, everyone would just say buy new hardware. Like it's your fault that their junk doesn't run. Everything is so incredibly standardized today there shouldn't need to be ridiculous hardware to run the internet and programs well, should be fine with mediocre hardware.
If I can't stream RUclips on a Slot 1 PII, I'm not interested
That actually used to be possible not too long ago with VLC and a lua script on Windows 98. Google has since broke it with an update unfortunately.
Running a modern web browser on an old computer completely defeats the point of this test. I have tried it using an old computer and a similarly old browser (1999) and the answer is... yes, but... it's busted asf. Only some pages will load at all. Most are broken in various ways.
It depends on what you're trying to accomplish. If you want to use an old browser like IE4 or Netscape, you can setup a WRP server to render pages remotely and display them as pictures with clickable image mapping.
@@DOSStormit would be interesting to see a continuation of this video of when you are able to keep upgrading the machine that is usable for daily tasks.
Peppermint os with lxde
Peppermint is cool and light for modern use, but it's a bit too heavy for these machines with low RAM.
@@DOSStorm ah gotcha
There's Lubuntu for light wight Linux distro.
Yes, I've used lubuntu! It might be a bit too heavy for a Pentium 2/3 though.
use on that old computer tiny11
or tiny10
Who doesnt have at least a 4 core, 8gb now days?
I would say that is probably the bare minimum for a modern machine, but you would be surprised how many people are still kicking around with 4GB of RAM. As for everything in this video, its obviously just impractical fun torturing poor old computers with the modern web.
@@DOSStorm 4GB RAM is doable depending how lightweight the OS for example I use BSD on my Vostro 1400 4GB DDR2 RAM until recently that the hdd gave out when the system froze upon swapping after switching to Ubuntu ESM
people sticks to what they have but if you are gonna go buy one then yes you want to get the most value so you should pick a modern CPU and higher RAM minimum 16GB
Pentium 2 es de finales de los 90 casi año 2000
Yes I misspoke, the Pentium 2 is from 97.
If you low on RAM you can also just download some more from google... 🤣
Sounds like a good idea if it would even load Google. lol
answer: no, not really
You mean surf the *web*.
From the title: Yeah I just did it yesterday.
I installed Linux mint on a laptop with a broken screen, one broken usb port, and no internal hard drive.
It is now a media server
I mean, technically the operating system is on a thumb drive. But that little fucker is never coming out of the laptop Because without it there is no storage
Celeron 300a at 450...good times circa 98
Subd❤
Thanks! I appreciate it.
YOU HAVE MY MOUSE
Heck yeah, the G305 is best mouse ever. I have like 5 of them. I don't have a problem, and I can stop at any time.
What a question. Of course they can. Simply install Linux and go.
In the last 6 months I've been upgrading laptops and PCs for friends and family by installing Linux (Debian XFce for too old pcs (between 500 and 1000 passmark cpu points), Linux Mint for newer ones (over 1000 Passmark CPU points)). For a minimally acceptable experience with Linux and the internet, you need a computer not older than 11-15 years ago (11 years if the machine was low end, 15 years if the machine was high end at the time of the purchase). I personally don't bother with any cpu with less than 500 passmark points, because youtube won't run properly on such pcs on anything other than 360p, and youtube is the no1 need these days online. Minimum to work properly is 4 GB of RAM too. Yes, you can install a lightweight Debian DE with 2 GB of RAM, but that won't allow you to open more than 1 tab on Chrome or Firefox. Even with 4 GB, too many tabs open at the same time will send you to swap. Don't get hang up on lightweight DEs that don't use more than 100 or 400 MBs of RAM. The moment a browser opens (especially Firefox which is a hog), your RAM will be eaten for lunch. Anything slower than the specs that I suggest, it's an exercise in futility, given my experience. No one would want to actually use these computers without a minimum of these specs. Even my 10 year old niece commented that it was "slow sometimes" (I gave her a DELL laptop that its cpu scores 500 points, with Debian XFce, and 4 GB of RAM).
Can you suggest any script block extension that can effectivly diminish proc&ram consume?
@@nihonam There's noscript for Firefox, and chrome. However, in this day and age, without Js, websites don't even load. NoScript was very popular extension back in the late 2000s, when websites didn't base their sites extensively on JS. After 2015, things changed. These days, the best way to avoid the RAM consumption is to use something like Opera Mini (if available on your platform), because that one is loading websites on Opera's servers, they re-process it to remove the JS in a way that makes sense, and then serve you a simpler webpage.
@@nihonamuse noscript or ublock origin
most younger gens uses phones the apps are more responsive with current hardware so it will feel different to a PC I have in 2009 dealing with delays. Playing youtube videos depends on if your GPU supports hardware acceleration on it for example my Geforce 9400M wont work on browsers but can use media player to offload video processing
Yes! TinyCoreLinux! More people need to know about it.
Its such a cool little distro, its probably the lightest one that is still maintained.
just use retrozilla
RUclips didn't work with Firefox probably because you forgot to activate DRM at Firefox settings
Fair point. I should check.
@@DOSStormDRM is for RUclips movies if it just a channel video then it will work but i think you might need to install ffmpeg on your system for the codecs