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

[Behemot]

Even Pentium D is pretty much useless these days, not to mention Northwood without SSE3. We have "few" Pentium D and C2D systems and more are coming daily, everybody is throwing that out currently, hopefully they'll at least buy those on the eastern markets (especially post-soviet republics) where they still often have just shit. Maybe there in Romania someone could use it, don't you know someone with a store who would be interested in PCs and especially refurbished UPSes?

[Dan81]

Re: the gutless, bloated, and fried power supply hall of shame

Even Pentium D is pretty much useless these days, not to mention Northwood without SSE3. We have "few" Pentium D and C2D systems and more are coming daily, everybody is throwing that out currently, hopefully they'll at least buy those on the eastern markets (especially post-soviet republics) where they still often have just shit. Maybe there in Romania someone could use it, don't you know someone with a store who would be interested in PCs and especially refurbished UPSes?

Sorry,not all of us use UPS' here...

As for Northwood, it also has XP FLP SP3. So basically an official slim version of XP (unlike every nLite edit) that runs on even a Pentium 233 MMX. (literally,I've seen such systems in my life.)

[Behemot]

Re: the gutless, bloated, and fried power supply hall of shame

Pentium MMX is about the minimum requirement for XP, but why on earth doing it. Even on these P4s you can run the OS, but that's about that. It does not handle even stupid sites like fleebay without stalling constantly, trust me, I still have not upgraded from that bloody 3.3GHz Prescott…

My question is if you know some store owner we can cooperate with, not if you use UPS. Even if one from 10000 would buy our refurbished UPSes (which are just about gazilion times better than brand new units) it would still be great deal

[Dan81]

Re: the gutless, bloated, and fried power supply hall of shame

Pentium MMX is about the minimum requirement for XP, but why on earth doing it. Even on these P4s you can run the OS, but that's about that. It does not handle even stupid sites like fleebay without stalling constantly, trust me, I still have not upgraded from that bloody 3.3GHz Prescott…

My question is if you know some store owner we can cooperate with, not if you use UPS. Even if one from 10000 would buy our refurbished UPSes (which are just about gazilion times better than brand new units) it would still be great deal

Sadly,there aren't many stores left in here. I know for a fact old PCs were usually used in high schools but now they're progressively replacing all the units with new stuff. I know some of the labs here had C2D in 2015-16,and this year they replaced them with i5s,and old P4s were replaced with the C2D units from 2016.

As for UPSs,no luck. The small stores that sell stuff (I guess they're the equivalent of Fry's?) are so crowded with LCD TVs now (and plasma screens) that they literally have no room to buy UPSs. That,or they either close down because of little to no sales.

[momaka]

Re: the gutless, bloated, and fried power supply hall of shame

Even on these P4s you can run the OS, but that's about that. It does not handle even stupid sites like fleebay without stalling constantly, trust me, I still have not upgraded from that bloody 3.3GHz Prescott…

I'm using a 32-bit 2.8 GHz Prescott, and eBay is fine for me. Yes, the pages don't load lightning-fast like they do on a new i5/i7 PC with an SSD, but it's not terrible either.

Using the right browser and right OS goes a long way to make your PC usable. XP with FireFox v24-v44 runs fairly well. Haven't tested any other newer browsers, though.

We have "few" Pentium D and C2D systems and more are coming daily, everybody is throwing that out currently

Same here. In fact, the current repair place where I work now, even core i3/i5/i7 chips are considered very old if they are not at least 6th gen. The only old systems we ever get in the shop are for data backup/extraction.

[Behemot]

Re: the gutless, bloated, and fried power supply hall of shame

The only right browser is Opera 12.18. Not that it is blazing fast with all the current web balast.

[momaka]

Re: the gutless, bloated, and fried power supply hall of shame

The only right browser is Opera 12.18.

The oldschool Opera 10/11/12 browsers are awesome, indeed.

But unfortunately, some pages with heavy scripts just need a modern browser to display properly and run right. eBay IS one of those websites, so I use FireFox 24 or newer for it. With Opera, the CPU usage on eBay is just stupid-high for whatever reason.

[Dan81]

Re: the gutless, bloated, and fried power supply hall of shame

The oldschool Opera 10/11/12 browsers are awesome, indeed.

But unfortunately, some pages with heavy scripts just need a modern browser to display properly and run right. eBay IS one of those websites, so I use FireFox 24 or newer for it. With Opera, the CPU usage on eBay is just stupid-high for whatever reason.

Usually any system that I have and that has enough RAM (1GB),but is old (DDR400) gets XP SP3 installed and latest Firefox (51).

It's one of their "2003"/"2005" chip-of-the-year BTX designs (BTX for Deer/L&C typically signifies the primary is located on the same side as the receptacle plug and the secondary is same side as the fan... not the other way around like with other "normal" PSUs).

That said, with a better rectifier on the 12V rail and bigger output caps, this thing could probably provide up to 14 Amps on the 12V rail, which should be enough to power a Pentium 4 / Core 2 Duo / low power Core i3 or i5 system with on-board or low-power GPU and single HDD. I'm not sure if it's worth the hassle fixing it, though.

I would do it for fun, but I don't expect anyone else to be like me.

As far as I know,their BTX designs were using the normal layout (primary located near fan and secondary near receptacle plug),or at least that is how my Allied AL-8400BTX looks inside.

[Behemot]

Re: the gutless, bloated, and fried power supply hall of shame

System with 1 gig is good maybe for one website. Even for XP 2 GB is minimum today.

[Dan81]

Re: the gutless, bloated, and fried power supply hall of shame

System with 1 gig is good maybe for one website. Even for XP 2 GB is minimum today.

Not really. I run 7 x64 with 2GB. 1GB for XP works well if you have a fast HDD.

[Behemot]

Re: the gutless, bloated, and fried power supply hall of shame

OMG we are talking normal usage, 10+ browser panels, antivirus, IM programs, Team and few more things. Not you lunatics with nothing…

I am curious how you'll simultaneously launch all that plus VLC and Photoshop or similar graphics program, yeah. In your dreams maybe. Even 8 GB could be sometimes limiting with also BOINC running, with 16 I can finally run everything I want simultaneously without even thinking about RAM at all.

[Dan81]

Re: the gutless, bloated, and fried power supply hall of shame

OMG we are talking normal usage, 10+ browser panels, antivirus, IM programs, Team and few more things. Not you lunatics with nothing…

I am curious how you'll simultaneously launch all that plus VLC and Photoshop or similar graphics program, yeah. In your dreams maybe. Even 8 GB could be sometimes limiting with also BOINC running, with 16 I can finally run everything I want simultaneously without even thinking about RAM at all.

Photoshop?
Wait a minute,we're talking about normal persons
Though yes,a 1GB machine I have survived about 15-24 tabs open (4chan,Google and a few others). As for AV,none used (I don't trust any AV anymore),no IM programs (Yahoo Messenger is quite dead on PC),and VLC does work (as long as I'm not playing some crazily high encoded mkv,that is - that stuff requires dualcore)

And for the record,I also run Firefox w/ nearly 30 tabs (yes,I did have 30 tabs open.) and Sony Vegas 13 (which eats RAM like crazy) on my 2GB machine. No lag whatsoever and silent operation as well. (since I undervolted the CPU from 1.2v or whatever it was rated to to plain 1v. 1.0v folks.)

[Behemot]

Re: the gutless, bloated, and fried power supply hall of shame

Think this talk is already worth sepparating to a new thread

Normal ppl use AV (none usefull goes under 100-200 MB these days), IMs, photo-editing SW, music player and lot of other applications simultaneously, that's the thing. I am glad I can now take new laptop with 8gigs instead of that bad NX5000 with only single working bank (limiting to 1 gig) if I need to. Cause I was SICK of constantly having to manage what I have running (and overall being heavily limited). Only have to find the time to install the new Phenom II X2 in it and tweak the undervolting…

[Per Hansson]

Re: the gutless, bloated, and fried power supply hall of shame

Think this talk is already worth sepparating to a new thread

Done

Discussion split off from here: https://www.badcaps.net/forum/showth...621#post733621

[Uranium-235]

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

I've used win7 32-bit on Prescott 775's HT's 2.8+ with 2gb. Honestly seven is more responsive with 32-bit under 2gb than 64-bit under the same. There is a whole bunch of WOW64 stuff that runs ontop of win7 64 that takes up memory and cpu

I have a dell xps in the other room with a Pentium D 965 EE (Dual core /w HT). 7 runs great, but you start browsing web sites and the fans kick in high no matter how thin a layer of AS5 I put on it. Its a 125w cpu and its insane

[momaka]

Re: the gutless, bloated, and fried power supply hall of shame

OMG we are talking normal usage, 10+ browser panels, antivirus, IM programs, Team and few more things. Not you lunatics with nothing…

Lunatics??? Haha ^, I like that . I guess I will take it as a compliment

Yes, I regularly have 10+ tabs open in my browser. More often, I have Opera 10 or 12 for my email and some basic websites like badcaps.net and then FireFox 24 open for websites that don't work well with Opera (like YouTube, eBay, Cheezeburger network, Google searches, etc.). And I still manage to stay under 1 GB of RAM (typically, my mem usage hovers around 500-700 MB, and occasionally up to 800-900. I hit 1+ GB only after many hours of surfing YouTube, at which point it starts running slow even on my PCs that do have more RAM. So I just restart my browser, and it all goes back to normal. Meanwhile, my email and other stuff I have open in Opera is unaffected.

As for AV - it's pointless to use AV these days, especially if you are an educated user and know what you are doing. Most AV programs are hardly any better than their ancestors from 10 years ago, especially the free ones. They just have a prettier interface. MalwareBytes is probably the only one worth having (but not really worth actively running with the PC). I am still quite amazed how people nowadays think that an AV program will protect you online - it won't. But I guess there's no point in trying educate the mass public... after all, I won't have my job now if I did. We still get quite a few infected machines in for repair - new stuff with Windows 10 too. The same old scamware that tricked people 10 years ago still works nowadays. On that note, the crypto-virus variants are the worst - can't pull the user's data for backup, so we can't charge them much, other than a small attempt/diagnostic fee.

And IM? That stuff is for kids. I use email for work and just about everything else I do. In fact, all of the work we do at my job right now can probably be easily done on a XP machine with 1 GB of RAM. And most offices are like that too. Skype for work? I pity the fools that do that. Skype has turned to absolute shit ever since MS bought it. It takes over 700 MB of RAM just to load the program... and for what exactly? To do the stuff that it did over 10 years ago when it started? (on that note, I find it funny how when you load Skype on a new/guest PC, it always defaults the settings to allow spam... errr sorry, I mean "chat messages" from everyone.)

Anyways...

Now obviously, if you are doing Photoshop and movie editing, that stuff will take more RAM. But then again, I don't see why anyone would use an old machine for film editing - everyone know that this stuff really benefits from a modern multi-core machine.

I am curious how you'll simultaneously launch all that plus VLC and Photoshop or similar graphics program, yeah.

I use Photoshop 7, so technically I can. I'm not a Photshop guru/expert, so Photoshop 7 is fine for my needs.

If you run an old PC, then you have to use the old software that was made for it at the time for everything to run well. Again, the only exception to that is the browser, because... well an old browser like IE5/6 and even 8 will be hopeless at running any modern web page.

[televizora]

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

...C2D systems and more are coming daily, everybody is throwing that out currently, hopefully they'll at least buy those on the eastern markets (especially post-soviet republics) where they still often have just shit. Maybe there in Romania someone could use it, don't you know someone with a store who would be interested in PCs and especially refurbished UPSes?

C2D is still better than the new Pentium-s, new Celerons, and all the Intel Atom/AMD APU-s. My C2D gets as much PassMark points as the new entry level Core i3.
So, C2D-s are still pretty much usable. On this laptop I watch 1080p HD videos without any troubles. Greetings from POST-SOVIETs
And I you want to see something REALLY LAGGY, then instead of ThinkPad T410 buy new Toshiba C660D with 1.4Ghz Single Core AMD APU. Then you will see what is bad.
I was a little offended by the statement about the "eastern post soviet countries", you know? I choose to use Lenovo T400, because of the design and quality, not because I can't afford new computer. It's just that it's getting harder every day to find quality stuff.

[Behemot]

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

I regularly see ppl complaining there is no quality HW there. Like PSU's or UPS'es. Not that it would be expensive, stores just don't carry those at all. Hey I too use old stuff, but rreasonably. Why suffer with 2 GB when I can buy 8 cheap from fleebay...

[televizora]

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

Hey I too use old stuff, but rreasonably. Why suffer with 2 GB when I can buy 8 cheap from fleebay...

Mine is upgraded to 4GB, but even 1.5GB is still enough for simple browsing. Can be used by old persons to talk with their children via Skype...

[eccerr0r]

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

I suppose you guys are disabling flash player completely on these old machines?

Maybe it's Linux but running my P4-3.4GHz, Athlon64-2800, P3-1200, Atom-1600 (all single core and possibly dual thread) - all of these, on certain sites, they really tax the machine whereas on a C2D-2.66GHz is just fine. Again it might just be flash player...

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!).


Me, I never have more than 4-5 tabs open on any machine regardless of memory...