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Older computers usable today

RogerWilco6502 said:
@556fmjoe Hit the nail on the head. For me personally, I need to interface with old TI calculators and synthesizers. The latter of which already have somewhat shaky driver stability on a good day and the former of which uses an esoteric piece of software that is only partially translated from Japanese and extremely picky about just about everything. I'd rather have the process be simplified by using a physical machine dedicated to such a purpose rather than complicate things tenfold by trying to run VMs to fit my needs.

Additionally, all hardware limitations and requirements aside, it's a known fact that VMs just don't run as well as actual hardware and, if I have the hardware available, I might as well use it. :p
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Sounds cool. It seems like you couldn’t really move up and down in terms of hardware or software though.
 
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 Most of us will agree that the number 1 limitation for our hobby is the software, not the outdated hardware.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.
View attachment 956651View attachment 956649View attachment 956652
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.
View attachment 956648
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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I am a collector, and I have many machines, I guarantee that any pentium 4 is usable nowadays, even using windows xp (with its SSL problems). At the beginning of the year, I was using the good old ZD8000, a 17 inch notebook, which has a 775 desktop socket, with a Pentium 4 of 3.6Ghz, 2GB of ram, Radeon X600 or x800 I don't remember) and a hd ide 160gb 7200rpm. I didn't notice any slowdown, I watched videos on YouTube normally (up to 720p!), And in my spare time, I played my favorite games from the Pentium 4 era (gta 3, vc, sa, Warcraft III, Age of empires III, underground nfs 1 and 2, Hl2 ...)

Of course, a pentium 4 is usually capable of running windows 7 normally (maybe Win10 too), but I prefer xp, due to compatibility with msdos games.

I also have a toshiba satellite P25, if I'm not mistaken, it was the first Toshiba model to come with a 17 inch display, and it was launched shortly after the 17 "Powerbook. My cousin bought it in 2003, it was used until 2009. I still have it the same way it came from the factory (with manuals, CDs, accessories, etc.)
 
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ZD8000 must be a screamer back then. With GPU power consumption ever increasing it is actually harder to do hardcore gaming On laptop today I would imagine.
 
sanfrancisofont1984 said:

A Science Project: "Make the 486 Great Again!" - Modern Linux in an ancient PC

What is the oldest x86 processor that is still supported by a modern Linux kernel in present time? I asked the above quiz question during the Geekcamp tech conference in Nov 2017 during my emcee role. The theoretical answer as you can glean from the title of this post is the 486 which was first...
yeokhengmeng.com
If you really want to prove a point.

So Windows 7 on PIII could do what well?
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These days? A Pentium 3 wouldn't exactly be a good choice for Windows 7, but you could absolutely find such old machines running the OS out in the wild. That was its real value, even if you had a slow old computer, you still had access to current software. That's what makes Windows 7 on a P3 so different from running a modern Linux kernel on a 486, doing that is really only good for a laugh.

ancientelectronics.wordpress.com

Upgrading my Dual Pentium III Tualatin PC

A few years back one of my blogs first articles was about dual CPU systems. One of the PC’s I talked about was my dual CPU Pentium III Tualatin machine. In this article I wanted to go a littl…
ancientelectronics.wordpress.com ancientelectronics.wordpress.com

And not all of these old computers were that slow.
 
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Python 3.6 is pretty current and has real value :)

I know there’s dual socket PIII but apart from collection why not C2D instead? The price from I see isn’t like the older the cheaper. The sweet spot is like 5-10 years old?
 
Fundamentally “can run“ current software isn’t that valuable. If I have a Threadripper why should I bother with anything that has pentium in its name? If I am so poor my only machine shouldn’t be a pentium either. So it is a really collector thing.
 
sanfrancisofont1984 said:
Fundamentally “can run“ current software isn’t that valuable. If I have a Threadripper why should I bother with anything that has pentium in its name? If I am so poor my only machine shouldn’t be a pentium either. So it is a really collector thing.
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I guess so. But I just actually like older laptops better. Keyboards, connectivity options, general quality, ease of repair, etc are all better in older machines. The only things they fall behind in are battery life, performance, and often (but not always) display quality. You can get around battery life and displays if you want by just plugging them in, so performance is the only issue left. But I don't care much about that as long as they do what I want. I have a Core 2 Duo General Dynamics laptop that I will pick up and use just as often as my T14 ThinkPad without even thinking about the performance difference.

It's a long winded way of saying that if it works, it works. Might as well use what I like.
 
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My main PC, a Dell Latitude D630, recently died so I've been using my early 2003 PowerBook G4 12" as my main PC for a week now. It's okay for pretty much everything I do. Minecraft runs okay, web browsing is okay, video playback is decent. I've even used it in school instead of my school provided Chromebook! I had to stop doing that though, as my textbooks squished the powerbook and it's now dented on the top of the display. YouTube plays okay at 360P with TenFiveTube, and is butter smooth at 240P.
 
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556fmjoe said:
I guess so. But I just actually like older laptops better. Keyboards, connectivity options, general quality, ease of repair, etc are all better in older machines. The only things they fall behind in are battery life, performance, and often (but not always) display quality. You can get around battery life and displays if you want by just plugging them in, so performance is the only issue left. But I don't care much about that as long as they do what I want. I have a Core 2 Duo General Dynamics laptop that I will pick up and use just as often as my T14 ThinkPad without even thinking about the performance difference.

It's a long winded way of saying that if it works, it works. Might as well use what I like.
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I can back this up wholeheartedly. My X41's keyboard is one of the best I've ever typed on and with the UltraBase it's a portable powerhouse when it comes to using it with older equipment. On the Mac side, I only own laptops from 2009 and older, and my newest (a 2009 MacBook) was one that I purchased from eBay two years ago for the sole purpose of having a daily driver that was capable of running decently modern software but could still interface with FireWire 400 devices and the like.
 
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I can see the keyboar/ports/repair/etc. advantage. One category I have a slight desire is some Compaq or Toshiba laptop that has a PIII or lower CPU. Good for playing with various operating systems in the 1990s. OTOH VM might do the trick well enough.
 
sanfrancisofont1984 said:
I can see the keyboar/ports/repair/etc. advantage. One category I have a slight desire is some Compaq or Toshiba laptop that has a PIII or lower CPU. Good for playing with various operating systems in the 1990s. OTOH VM might do the trick well enough.
Click to expand...

I'm with you there, old Toshiba business laptops were built like tanks. Too bad they're out of the laptop game now, but there have been a lot of casualties recently among the dominant 1990s and early 2000s players.
 
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sanfrancisofont1984 said:

A Science Project: "Make the 486 Great Again!" - Modern Linux in an ancient PC

What is the oldest x86 processor that is still supported by a modern Linux kernel in present time? I asked the above quiz question during the Geekcamp tech conference in Nov 2017 during my emcee role. The theoretical answer as you can glean from the title of this post is the 486 which was first...
yeokhengmeng.com
If you really want to prove a point.

So Windows 7 on PIII could do what well?
Click to expand...
I ran Windows 7 on my PIII ThinkPad A22m for like a year when it came out. 800Mhz, 512MB of ram. Back then I used to bounce between Windows 2003 and 7 on that laptop. It handled 7 pretty well. The only issue was that the Rage 128 has the same problem in Vista and above as it does when using a Rage 128 with Leopard. Acceleration like half worked, which was usually the cause of me going back to 2003 on it.
Rikintosh said:
I am a collector, and I have many machines, I guarantee that any pentium 4 is usable nowadays, even using windows xp (with its SSL problems). At the beginning of the year, I was using the good old ZD8000, a 17 inch notebook, which has a 775 desktop socket, with a Pentium 4 of 3.6Ghz, 2GB of ram, Radeon X600 or x800 I don't remember) and a hd ide 160gb 7200rpm. I didn't notice any slowdown, I watched videos on YouTube normally (up to 720p!), And in my spare time, I played my favorite games from the Pentium 4 era (gta 3, vc, sa, Warcraft III, Age of empires III, underground nfs 1 and 2, Hl2 ...)

Of course, a pentium 4 is usually capable of running windows 7 normally (maybe Win10 too), but I prefer xp, due to compatibility with msdos games.

I also have a toshiba satellite P25, if I'm not mistaken, it was the first Toshiba model to come with a 17 inch display, and it was launched shortly after the 17 "Powerbook. My cousin bought it in 2003, it was used until 2009. I still have it the same way it came from the factory (with manuals, CDs, accessories, etc.)
Click to expand...
I'd imagine the P4 in my OP would run better with more ram and a better drive.
Amethyst1 said:
In all fairness, eg. El Capitan runs on eight-year-old Macs. Catalina runs on seven-year-old Macs. So in terms of macOS running on older hardware it's somewhat decent. They just drop older versions way too quickly imo.
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The difference is that back then, hard ware was changing and getting faster exponentially. Today, not the case. I make this argument quite a bit. Computers really have not advanced much at all in the past 10-15 years.
Personally, any of the macs that we have shoehorned "patched" a newer version of OS X on should have been officially supported in the first place. Sub-867 G4s, even Catalina and Big Sur will run on a 2008 Mac Pro, that was cut off at 10.11.
 
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Intel hasn't been getting faster fast enough for the last 5 years. AMD and Apple are doing okay though. On the "lower end" I'm pretty impressed by Ryzen 3 3300X.
OS X/Mac is at a weird spot now. New Macs are not ground breaking. The demands are still strong (judging from the second hand prices). I really hope the AS transition could make Mac weird again.
 
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sanfrancisofont1984 said:
Most core m search results come from 2016 or earlier unless I time limit it.
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Because Intel have dropped the Core M/m3/m5/m7 branding. It's all i3/i5/i7 again. Those Y-series CPUs are still alive and kicking.

Edit:
www.ultrabookreview.com

Fanless laptops (completely silent) in 2025 - the best options

In this article, we're discussing fanless laptops and silent Windows ultrabooks and Chromebooks, or in other words, laptops with passive cooling solutions,
www.ultrabookreview.com
 
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sanfrancisofont1984 said:
I see. The thing is that all these notebooks could be slower than the entry level iPad (A12) just released.
www.macrumors.com

AnandTech Calls A12 Bionic in iPhone XS 'Just Margins Off' Best Desktop CPUs in New Review

AnandTech, known for in-depth reviews of new Apple products, today published a lengthy review of the iPhone XS and XS Max, Apple's newest...
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And I would not bet my money on them not overheating all the time.
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That's a bad comparison IMO because they are completely different architectures. It's like how you can't really compare x86 and PPC, they all have their advantages and disadvantages and it's hard to test every use case. Additionally these are different classes of device, it'd be like comparing an ultrabook processor with a workstation processor.
 
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RogerWilco6502 said:
That's a bad comparison IMO because they are completely different architectures. It's like how you can't really compare x86 and PPC, they all have their advantages and disadvantages and it's hard to test every use case. Additionally these are different classes of device, it'd be like comparing an ultrabook processor with a workstation processor.
Click to expand...

Aren’t benchmarks doing the same computations like decoding a JPEG image many times.
 
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