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Modern browsers on legacy PC's (Split thread from PSU hall of shame)

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    #21
    Re: Modern browsers on legacy PC's (Split thread from PSU hall of shame)

    Originally posted by eccerr0r View Post
    I suppose you guys are disabling flash player completely on these old machines?
    Negative.

    Flash is actually what allows me to still play YouTube on my old PCs. In particular, I still use Flash 10.3. That said, YouTube defaults to HTML5 nowadays, even if the browser doesn't support it. This makes it nearly impossible to watch anything, because HTML5 is built for new hardware and heavily relies on hardware acceleration.

    But one workaround I have found is to use a Plug-In for FireFox called YouTube Flash Player (v50 or newer). It basically forces YouTube to use Flash Player. For old PCs that don't support hardware acceleration and/or HTML5, this thing is a godsend. I can actually still watch *some* 720p videos on YouTube (typically the lower bitrate stuff). 480p is no problem at all. With HTML5, even 360p is a slideshow on the same old machines.

    So old hardware is still not that useless nowadays. You just have to know the workarounds.

    Yes, I can grab a $50 laptop with an i3 and 4 GB of RAM in it, and that will sure as heck beat my P4 stuff any day. But why don't I? Because most new stuff nowadays is built like shit. I work in a big national computer store chain right now, and all I can say is that new stuff is just built like shit and not worth getting. No seriously, I'm talking about shit like laptops that are 1 year old and their crappy China-made batteries are already bulging and on their way to either catch fire or break something (for MacBooks, you get a nice cracked Trackpad, and sometimes screen - enjoy the repair costs for that, folks!) Oh, and let's not forget the ultra-thin laptops that run their soldered CPUs at 70+ Celsius (some of the really small ones even hit over 80C). Let's see how long those last.

    Originally posted by eccerr0r View Post
    My "test website" is yahoo.com. This site is just about unusable on slower machines, then again some people claim it's unusable regardless your machine (at least if you value your security!).
    Yahoo, AOL, MSN... they all suck. Even the latest i7's we have at work seem to hesitate for a second or so when loading the browser with those pages.
    Last edited by momaka; 03-22-2017, 06:06 AM.

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      #22
      Re: Modern browsers on legacy PC's (Split thread from PSU hall of shame)

      I run 3x 27" monitors. 2 of those monitors have browser windows (waterfox 49.0.3 on Win7 Ultimate) open on them. The middle monitor has the 'main' browser window, usually 3~5 tabs open. The right monitor has a thin window open, only one tab sized around a chatbox for a car site I operate. Above that is a normal size window with usually 2~3 tabs. The left monitor is my email client, and other things (lately its been dvd decrypter running like a freight train)...but there's always something going on. The system yawns at this. The system is dual 5400-series zeon @ 3.4GHz 1600FSB, 64gb ram, 15K RPM spinners, quadro NVS510 2gb GPU. The CPU's are just glorified C2Q's.....has no issues.
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        #23
        Re: Modern browsers on legacy PC's (Split thread from PSU hall of shame)

        Originally posted by momaka View Post
        Yes, I can grab a $50 laptop with an i3 and 4 GB of RAM in it, and that will sure as heck beat my P4 stuff any day. But why don't I? Because most new stuff nowadays is built like shit. I work in a big national computer store chain right now, and all I can say is that new stuff is just built like shit and not worth getting. No seriously, I'm talking about shit like laptops that are 1 year old and their crappy China-made batteries are already bulging and on their way to either catch fire or break something (for MacBooks, you get a nice cracked Trackpad, and sometimes screen - enjoy the repair costs for that, folks!) Oh, and let's not forget the ultra-thin laptops that run their soldered CPUs at 70+ Celsius (some of the really small ones even hit over 80C). Let's see how long those last.
        Ppl are totaly dumb these days, they use everything like toilet paper. Throuw away one bulk (often still working) HW from one door and push overpriced new HW shit to the other door at the same time.

        All the new laptops are just plastic crap with NO metal reinforcement. I've noticed quite often the brass threads for hinge screws just get torn off of the body after as soon as one year of usage. Laptop with lid half torn off is pretty much useless of course…so time to get a new one!
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          #24
          Re: Modern browsers on legacy PC's (Split thread from PSU hall of shame)

          Originally posted by Behemot View Post
          All the new laptops are just plastic crap with NO metal reinforcement. I've noticed quite often the brass threads for hinge screws just get torn off of the body after as soon as one year of usage. Laptop with lid half torn off is pretty much useless of course…so time to get a new one!
          Some are still well built, the thinkpad t450s and t460s we have at work hold up pretty well and many employees give them a pretty good beating, They have a solid chassis (but still not as good as the older T-series), but still BGA CPUs (like the vast majority of new laptops) since we have a 3 year replacement cycle the BGA CPUs are unlikely to cause a major issue, but being dropped or knocked around is a fact of life for corporate laptops so a strong chassis is vital. The newer HP Elitebooks we have are absolute garbage (luckily the last of those is coming up for replacement this year), nothing but cheap plastic junk (that isn't that cheap to buy). The older Probook/Elitebooks had their share of electronic issues, but at least had solid chassis, but now they have garbage electronics and garbage chassis. My Dell Precision M4600 (circa 2012) is built solid as a rock (and the newer M4800 is basically the same chassis) but it was pretty much "top of the line" when new (I bought it "off-lease" for much less) so that is somewhat expected at that price point (though may "gaming" laptops cost just as much and aren't nearly as well built).

          I do agree however that the junk far exceeds the well built stuff anymore. Consumer grade laptops are almost all garbage these days, and even some of the "business grade" ones are now just as bad. The first laptop I ever had was a circa 2005 Acer Aspire 5002wlmi, this "entry level" consumer model is more solidly built than many of today's "business grade" laptops and still works to this day, of course it is pretty much useless with a single core AMD Turion and 1GB ram and the battery stopped holding a charge long ago, but it still powers on and boots nonetheless, sadly I've seen many recent 1 or 2 year old consumer grade (even some higher-end ones) laptops that can't match that feat.
          Last edited by dmill89; 03-22-2017, 08:16 PM.

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            #25
            Re: Modern browsers on legacy PC's (Split thread from PSU hall of shame)

            Originally posted by dmill89 View Post
            Some are still well built, the thinkpad t450s and t460s we have at work hold up pretty well and many employees give them a pretty good beating, They have a solid chassis (but still not as good as the older T-series), but still BGA CPUs (like the vast majority of new laptops) since we have a 3 year replacement cycle the BGA CPUs are unlikely to cause a major issue, but being dropped or knocked around is a fact of life for corporate laptops so a strong chassis is vital. The newer HP Elitebooks we have are absolute garbage (luckily the last of those is coming up for replacement this year), nothing but cheap plastic junk (that isn't that cheap to buy). The older Probook/Elitebooks had their share of electronic issues, but at least had solid chassis, but now they have garbage electronics and garbage chassis. My Dell Precision M4600 (circa 2012) is built solid as a rock (and the newer M4800 is basically the same chassis) but it was pretty much "top of the line" when new (I bought it "off-lease" for much less) so that is somewhat expected at that price point (though may "gaming" laptops cost just as much and aren't nearly as well built).

            I do agree however that the junk far exceeds the well built stuff anymore. Consumer grade laptops are almost all garbage these days, and even some of the "business grade" ones are now just as bad. The first laptop I ever had was a circa 2005 Acer Aspire 5002wlmi, this "entry level" consumer model is more solidly built than many of today's "business grade" laptops and still works to this day, of course it is pretty much useless with a single core AMD Turion and 1GB ram and the battery stopped holding a charge long ago, but it still powers on and boots nonetheless, sadly I've seen many recent 1 or 2 year old consumer grade (even some higher-end ones) laptops that can't match that feat.
            I know one of my relatives still uses a old Acer Travelmate 800i with XP (previously ran Longhorn 4074 - I might get back to that,it was cool ) SP3 and Flash and stuff run fine. It's a HOT (I literally mean hot as in 666*C hot.) Centrino 1.7GHz with 2GB of RAM (DDR1,quite frankly) and a 80GB Samsung HDD.
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              #26
              Re: Modern browsers on legacy PC's (Split thread from PSU hall of shame)

              Kind of pissed that Firefox is dropping both XP and Vista at the same time. Fair enough if they want the last of the die-hard XP users to migrate to a later system, but Vista still has some time left in it, even if M$ doesn't want to show it. A fully updated and tuned Vista machine (e.g. no bloat/HDD-thrashing background BS) is way closer to 7 than XP, which is closer to Windows 2000 by comparison. When they block Vista with Firefox 53, they may as well have blocked 7 and 8 as well. Looks like I will have to hide a copy of Firefox 52 next to my backups of Firefox 12 (for 2000) and 2.0.0.20 (Win98) just in case a newly-formatted XP machine ends up stuck with IE6 and is effectively blocked from the entire internet via that browser.

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                #27
                Re: Modern browsers on legacy PC's (Split thread from PSU hall of shame)

                I don't know of any other browsers that still support Windows XP.

                There are some lightweight Linux distributions that can handle web browsing using the latest version of Firefox with 512MB of RAM. Unfortunately, the Linux version of Firefox is becoming as slow and bloated as the Windows version, and it will soon stop supporting old CPUs. I'm still running Linux on an Athlon XP, so I will have to switch browsers if I still want updates.

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                  #28
                  Re: Modern browsers on legacy PC's (Split thread from PSU hall of shame)

                  Originally posted by momaka View Post
                  Yes, I can grab a $50 laptop with an i3 and 4 GB of RAM in it, and that will sure as heck beat my P4 stuff any day. But why don't I? Because most new stuff nowadays is built like shit. I work in a big national computer store chain right now, and all I can say is that new stuff is just built like shit and not worth getting. No seriously, I'm talking about shit like laptops that are 1 year old and their crappy China-made batteries are already bulging and on their way to either catch fire or break something (for MacBooks, you get a nice cracked Trackpad, and sometimes screen - enjoy the repair costs for that, folks!) Oh, and let's not forget the ultra-thin laptops that run their soldered CPUs at 70+ Celsius (some of the really small ones even hit over 80C). Let's see how long those last.
                  ppl get what they pay for. u pay peanuts, u get monkeys. i guess monkeys are using cheap computers now instead of humans...

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                    #29
                    Re: Modern browsers on legacy PC's (Split thread from PSU hall of shame)

                    Originally posted by Dan81 View Post
                    I know one of my relatives still uses a old Acer Travelmate 800i with XP (previously ran Longhorn 4074 - I might get back to that,it was cool ) SP3 and Flash and stuff run fine. It's a HOT (I literally mean hot as in 666*C hot.) Centrino 1.7GHz with 2GB of RAM (DDR1,quite frankly) and a 80GB Samsung HDD.
                    May get Pentium M Dothan around 2 GHz, they cost almost nothing from fleebay these days. It's 50 % more powerfull with lower power draw (as it has SpeedStep).
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                      #30
                      Re: Modern browsers on legacy PC's (Split thread from PSU hall of shame)

                      Ever tried Pale Moon? They do have a browser that runs well in XP and Atom computers.
                      CPU: Sempron 2500+ / P4 2.8E / P4 2.6C / A64 x2 4000+ / E6420 / E8500 / i5-3470 / i7-3770
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                        #31
                        Re: Modern browsers on legacy PC's (Split thread from PSU hall of shame)

                        What's that?
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                          #32
                          Re: Modern browsers on legacy PC's (Split thread from PSU hall of shame)

                          Originally posted by Behemot View Post
                          What's that?
                          https://www.palemoon.org/
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                            #33
                            Re: Modern browsers on legacy PC's (Split thread from PSU hall of shame)

                            Hmm. That has gestures?
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                              #34
                              Re: Modern browsers on legacy PC's (Split thread from PSU hall of shame)

                              Pale moon is a fork of Firefox, did they speed it up that much?
                              They too dropped old OS/CPU support it seems?

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                                #35
                                Re: Modern browsers on legacy PC's (Split thread from PSU hall of shame)

                                Originally posted by eccerr0r View Post
                                Pale moon is a fork of Firefox, did they speed it up that much?
                                They too dropped old OS/CPU support it seems?
                                Can't say. At work right now so most sites are blocked for me.

                                I only mentioned it because I used the Pale Moon for newish computers and I distinctly remember from researching this browser that they had a WIndows XP or for Intel Atom version of the browser.
                                From the Wiki tough:

                                "Pale Moon does not support older processors without the SSE2 instruction set.[5] Version 26.5 was the final version to support Windows XP.[17]"
                                CPU: Sempron 2500+ / P4 2.8E / P4 2.6C / A64 x2 4000+ / E6420 / E8500 / i5-3470 / i7-3770
                                GPU: TNT2 M64 / Radeon 9000 / MX 440-SE / 7300GT / Radeon 4670 / GTS 250 / Radeon 7950 / 660 Ti / GTS 450

                                Main Driver: Intel i7 3770 | Asus P8H61-MX | MSI GTS 450 | 8GB of NO NAME DDR3 RAM (2x4GB) | 1TB SATA HDD (W.D. Blue) | ASUS DVD-RW | 22" HP Compaq LE2202x (1920x1080) | Seasonic S12II-620 PSU | Antec 300 | Windows 7 Ultimate with SP1

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                                  #36
                                  Re: Modern browsers on legacy PC's (Split thread from PSU hall of shame)

                                  Originally posted by ChaosLegionnaire View Post
                                  ppl get what they pay for. u pay peanuts, u get monkeys. i guess monkeys are using cheap computers now instead of humans...
                                  Not exactly. Even many of the expensive stuff are built like junk. Behemot is right when he said,
                                  Originally posted by Behemot
                                  Ppl are totaly dumb these days, they use everything like toilet paper. Throuw away one bulk (often still working) HW from one door and push overpriced new HW shit to the other door at the same time.

                                  Comment


                                    #37
                                    Re: Modern browsers on legacy PC's (Split thread from PSU hall of shame)

                                    It's difficult to find quality these days, many just stopped making quality products at all. Or they charge so high it's even more expensive than it was decade or two ago.
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                                      #38
                                      Re: Modern browsers on legacy PC's (Split thread from PSU hall of shame)

                                      Just build a PC with used parts I have from some pcs I fixed and my old p4 that was giving me troubles, it have 1.5gb or DDR a p4 presshot at 2.8ghz and a Radeon 7000 agp (soon a x1650), now I know what browser to use, btw that 7000 is slow but it's the first ever Radeon so is nice to have it, paid 3 bucks for it.

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                                        #39
                                        Re: Modern browsers on legacy PC's (Split thread from PSU hall of shame)

                                        Any 9000 would be much better, more acceleration and stuff. X16x0 is still better than that though Lower X1xx0 actually use different, older cores IIRC…
                                        Last edited by Behemot; 04-04-2017, 01:05 AM.
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                                          #40
                                          Re: Modern browsers on legacy PC's (Split thread from PSU hall of shame)

                                          Anbyody has some recent experience comparing Northwood and Prescott cores? I've just run into 3.2GHz Northwood so I wonder if it will be actually faster than 3@3.3GHz Prescott.

                                          Now I know Northwoods have better IPC so clock-by-clock they have better raw speed. However, Prescott has SSE3. So not only it limits some newer programs which already require SSE3, but even those which can go around that by using more older instructions may run slower as using more instructions/cycles to achieve the same pretty much kills any IPC benefit. I think all that crap on web and modern browsers use SSE3 pretty much, no?
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