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Older computers usable today

RhianB said:
All of my gaming rigs back in the day were AMD based (except my first laptop that I used for mobile gaming that was a p3 500Mhz rage pro - I think, that was a long time ago lol) as well up to my current i7 gaming rig. My next rig will most certainly be a Ryzen platform. I currently have a P2 500Mhz and P3 600mhz builds in my closet. I would like to get my hands on an AMD Athlon 1000mhz and build something up with that. That paired with 1.5Ghz PC133 ram and a agp Voodoo5500 (don't recall the motherboard unfortunately) was one of my favorite beige mid tower gaming rigs back then.
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Do you still have that Voodoo 5? Because if you don't, I would tell you to never look up for what they sell for now. I'm glad I still have one because I got it for about $80 at the time. My workhorse had been a Voodoo 3 2000, and when the 5 got cheap, I needed one.

And if I was going to be make a retro Windows 9x box, it would be around that video card. Oh, and my Diamond Monster MX 300, an excellent Aureal A3D sound card that is still the best discreet sound card I've ever owned, to this day.
 
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repairedCheese said:
Do you still have that Voodoo 5? Because if you don't, I would tell you to never look up for what they sell for now. I'm glad I still have one because I got it for about $80 at the time. My workhorse had been a Voodoo 3 2000, and when the 5 got cheap, I needed one.

And if I was going to be make a retro Windows 9x box, it would be around that video card. Oh, and my Diamond Monster MX 300, an excellent Aureal A3D sound card that is still the best discreet sound card I've ever owned, to this day.
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Oh man, it’s much much worse than that. Get ready for it: I gave mine away. o_O

Yanno, I had moved onto faster Non-agp graphics and boxes without agp at all and at the time, (early 2000s) it did not occur to me that these hot, case clogging, air craft carriers would ever be Collectible lol.

Yeah, donated it to goodwill with a bunch of other old (now collectible) computer hardware.

I know, I still kick myself over that. There was some other cool stuff in the donation mix —as if the 5500 wasn’t bad enough on its own lol.
 
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RhianB said:
Oh man, it’s much much worse than that. Get ready for it: I gave mine away. o_O

Yanno, I had moved onto faster Non-agp graphics and boxes without agp at all and at the time, (early 2000s) it did not occur to me that these hot, case clogging, air craft carriers would ever be Collectible lol.

Yeah, donated it to goodwill with a bunch of other old (now collectible) computer hardware.

I know, I still kick myself over that. There was some other cool stuff in the donation mix —as if the 5500 wasn’t bad enough on its own lol.
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I recoiled in horror reading this. Sorry for your loss :(
 
Project Alice said:
So in another thread, the topic about PPC macs being usable today came up yet again. Particularly the one video we all (sarcasm) love so much about a quad G5 and a 2006 Intel Mini.

That got me thinking; we all talk about how PPC macs can definitely be made usable for us today, even on youtube though it can be a pain. Most of us will agree that the number 1 limitation for our hobby is the software, not the outdated hardware. I wanted to test this in a very "average use" like way.

Right now I am typing this on an IBM NetVIsta PC made around 2000 or 2001. A machine made the same time as most our beloved PPCs. It originally came with Windows 98, and a 1.5Ghz Pentium 4. Today, it is running with a 2.6Ghz Pentium 4, and Windows 7 with the latest, official version of FireFox quantum 80.0.1 at time of writing.
It has 1GB of ram, a GeForce 6200, and a 10GB Hard drive because that's what I had laying around when I set this up. I believe the drive is a bottleneck for the system.
On paper, that 2.6Ghz P4 should be fast. I honestly cannot tell a difference between it and the 1.5Ghz one that was in here before it.
This machine is the closest I could think of to compare a PPC with modern architecture. Being as its x86 it can obviously run a lot of software our old macs can't.
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To start, I went directly to youtube. It was actually very, very slow. It felt about the same as using TenFourFox on a 1.5Ghz G4 PowerBook. Even typing this feels pretty slow. I feel like I'm using a slower G4.
I don't generally go to youtube on PPC macs, but I visit this site quite a bit on them. This forum when viewed on my dual 1.8Ghz G5 is much more responsive than this Pentium 4 at 70% higher clockspeed than the G5. I'm sure the extra CPU core is an advantage there though. I can say the same about my dual 1.42MDD. Using this IBM right now feels about the speed of using my 1Ghz iMac G4, which I would think is a much slower computer on paper than this one is.
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Now I haven't done any optimizations on this PC at all, and like I said this old 10GB HDD is pretty paltry for Win7. I know how to optimize Windows pretty well, and that this computer isn't quite yet at it's full potential. That said I feel confident saying that certain PPC macs, are actually more usable than this PC with a modern OS, and modern browser out of the box.

I want to do a better test than this, with a larger more modern drive. Maybe even an SSD. There is only 2GB free space on this thing which has a huge impact on performance; do all the Windows tweaks for performance, max out the ram, this should be able to fit 1.5GB in it, as it has 3 ram slots like a QS PowerMac. I wanted to run some benchmarks but I don't think it would be a fair comparison with this HDD in it right now.
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Things I would do:
- max the RAM if possible
- install an SSD
- Install Windows 10 Apparently Windows 10 won't run on Pentium 4 due to lack of NX bit.

Windows 10 runs surprisingly well even on very old hardware. Windows 10 (and even Windows 8) actually runs better than Windows 7. I tried installing Windows 10 and 8 on a Netbook before, and they definitely ran better than Windows 7.
 
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ian87w said:
Things I would do:
- max the RAM if possible
- install an SSD
- Install Windows 10

Windows 10 runs surprisingly well even on very old hardware. Windows 10 (and even Windows 8) actually runs better than Windows 7. I tried installing Windows 10 and 8 on a Netbook before, and they definitely ran better than Windows 7.
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Windows 10 is a no-go on socket 478, due to lack of required CPU instructions, and XD-bit.
 
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sparty411 said:
I recoiled in horror reading this. Sorry for your loss :(
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Yeah full horror-show disclosure. There were two model Ms, a 386 and 486 in that mix as well. Whoo boy does that sting when I think about it. IIRC there was a Rage 128 pro & a Voodoo 3 as well.

Mind you this is 2002-3ish, I was very single and wanted to keep life light and portable at the time because yanno, I was going to be a titan of industry and rule the world. :D

Ahh well the hubris and stupidity of youth. So is life I suppose. Most everything that was not squirrelled away in my folks garage, was donated in the great purge.
 
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ian87w said:
Windows 10 runs surprisingly well even on very old hardware. Windows 10 (and even Windows 8) actually runs better than Windows 7. I tried installing Windows 10 and 8 on a Netbook before, and they definitely ran better than Windows 7.
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I hate Windows 10. As I said in another comment I only use it when absolutely required. If I were to buy a new PC that came with 10, it would either get replaced with 7, or Linux.
Windows 10 is also not at all faster than Windows 7 on the same hardware in my experience. What you were experiencing is most likely the results of a clean windows install vs a 7 install that was probably older. 8.1 when properly configured runs about the same as 7. But it's ugly so why?
Windows starts to run like crap on everything when not reinstalled every couple years; one of the reasons I liked using Macs instead.
sparty411 said:
Windows 10 is a no-go on socket 478, due to lack of required CPU instructions, and XD-bit.
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Amethyst1 said:
Windows 10 will not run on a Pentium 4 that old.
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Microsoft actually used an emulator for that instruction set for Windows Vista and above, removing the emulator in Windows 8.1. There was one the works for an early pre-release version of 10 (I think it was 10?) that was never finished. I have no idea why the vast PC and Retro PC community hasn't picked it up yet, as it is absolutely possible. Stuff like this is why I kick myself for not getting into programming\development.

I actually got Windows 10 installed on my AMD Socket 939, which also lacks the NX instruction. The CPU was an AMD Athlon 64x2. I had to use the 32bit version of Windows, and none of the hardware was recognized including the NIC and USB ports, all of which worked out of the box in Windows 8.0 and older. This made driver installation a huge pain.
I did not even have that success (if you can call it that) on my Pentium M laptop. It installs and when it comes time to reboot to finish the installation in Blue screens.
 
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Project Alice said:
Windows starts to run like crap on everything when not reinstalled every couple years; one of the reasons I liked using Macs instead.
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Good old windows rot. I'm surprised it happens so fast. A brand new computer gets noticeably slower after just a couple years. No Mac I've has has had that problem either. I'm really surprised they haven't fixed the problem considering it's been an issue forever.
 
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AL1630 said:
Good old windows rot. I'm surprised it happens so fast. A brand new computer gets noticeably slower after just a couple years. No Mac I've has has had that problem either. I'm really surprised they haven't fixed the problem considering it's been an issue forever.
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Windows hasn’t really changed in structure all that much. It’s all been Windows NT since XP. Obviously there are changes, but there’s a reason I can run a piece of software built for XP on Windows 10. The only stuff that usually has compatibility problems is drivers. Even then, if a driver works for Windows Vista, more likely than not it’ll work on Windows 10. Vista is sorta the cut off with drivers.
Certain versions run better for longer when maintained properly. Windows 2000, Server 2003 (or XP 64, same kernel/codebase) and Windows 7 are the best operating systems to ever come out of that company. They’ll still get slow but it’s not as noticeable as they were built to be on 24/7. XP focused too much on the consumer. Server 2003 fixed everything that was wrong with XP.
10 is actually good at maintaining itself, but the bloatware and built in spyware, and general clunky interface just makes it not even worthwhile.

I guess Mac OS X or “macOS” is still Darwin after all these years. The difference there is Darwin was always good as far as stability goes. Though IMHO quality control has gone way down since the yearly updates. I’ve never had to hard-shutdown Leopard for freezing entirely. My Mac Pro with Mojave has done it 3 times just this week.
 
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AL1630 said:
Good old windows rot. I'm surprised it happens so fast. A brand new computer gets noticeably slower after just a couple years. No Mac I've has has had that problem either. I'm really surprised they haven't fixed the problem considering it's been an issue forever.
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Wondering if most rot isn't NTFS fragmentation, at least on old spinning hard drives. That and the plethora of resource sucking and pointless services, which get added with free toolbars and "Windows Optimisers" that get downloaded far too often.

My brother used to run Diskkeeper constantly in the background to keep his drives in some kind of functional order. Other FSes like BeFS, HPFS or HFS+ never seemed to suffer from this kind of blight.
 
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z970mp said:
@Project Alice Remind me; what exactly was so great about Server 2003 again?
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What I said in my previous post? It basically fixed everything that was wrong with XP. It’s a different OS even though it looks the same. XP is NT 5.1, 2003 is NT 5.2. The 64bit versions of XP used the NT 5.2 kernel. Once I learned a few things I realized XP wasn’t as great as all the fans of it think. It wasn’t bad either but, if I had to pick between XP, and 2000, I’d pick 2000. But 2003 over both of them.

Anything that ran on XP was also capable of running on it. Some software would complain that it won’t, but all that usually required was modifying the installer to skip the OS check; iTunes is a prime example of that. I used it over XP all the time back in the day. Nearly impossible to kill and had better memory management too.

Of course by default 2003 is setup as a server, but can have all those settings disabled or changed to match Windows XP. With the exception of system restore and fast user switching. I’ve never needed system restore on 2003 though, it never died to the point that was necessary.
 
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Server came in a cool grey box rather than XP's blue or green one. I mean, grey - nuff said :p

Cool fact: Server 2003 Web is limited to 2 GB RAM and actually less capable than XP in this regard.
 
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Amethyst1 said:
Server came in a cool grey box rather than XP's blue or green one. I mean, grey - nuff said :p

Cool fact: Server 2003 Web is limited to 2 GB RAM and actually less capable than XP in this regard.
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Yes, I always used Standard or Enterprise. Usually Enterprise. Though the machines it was running usually has less than 2GB lol. I installed enterprise on my Mac Pro 3,1 8 core with 20GB of ram. Lets see XP utilize that lol.
z970mp said:
@Project Alice What did it fix that was wrong with XP, besides better memory management and a newer kernel?
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Those are two very large things in an OS. The newer kernel came with MUCH better stability. It was also faster when tailored to be a workstation - setup to match XPs default settings.
It could also handle much better hardware. More CPUs, and even the 32bit editions could use up to 64GB with PAE enabled. This makes it fun to install on say, multi CPU Mac Pro’s or equivalent.

Think of it as the difference between Vista and 7. NT 6.0 and 6.1 respectively. Everyone hated Vista but really, it was fine. Especially after SP1. 7 fixed everything that was wrong with Vista in the same regard.

Edit: just found this
 
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