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Who here is using the oldest PC? Share your awful specs.

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I have an Athlon XP 2500+ with 512MB of RAM and an 80GB HD laying around somewhere, but it's not really in the spirit of the thread.
 
I remembered I got a Eee Pc for a good while,I can't remember the specs though. What I remember was that I had to turn the youtube quality to 360p cause anything higher than that won't even play properly.

I also had a Dell inspiron 1501 for 5 years before changing. That was from 2007 to 2012
 
Back at my parents house, I have a Packard Bell 400 mhz Celeron desktop.

Oldest computer I have with me now is an HP desktop:

Mobile Sempron 2.0 GHz
768MB DDR2 RAM
80GB IDE Hard Drive
ATI Radeon Xpress 200

I tried installing Windows 8. It works but I couldn't find working video drivers to enable higher resolutions. Windows 7 works pretty good though.

What I want to do for shits and giggles is install an SSD in there just to see how much of a bottleneck HD's are.
 
The machine running my MAME cabinet is really getting on. It's a 2.4 GHz Pentium 4 and like 768 megs of whatever RAM I could scrounge up. I wanna say the video card is a Geforce 4 MX.

I really need to look into replacing it. It's just a timebomb waiting to happen. It's a circa 2004 Dell Optiplex. Anybody working in an IT environment around that time will remember this as the model with a 90% failure rate due to capacitor plague.
 
MacGurcules said:
The machine running my MAME cabinet is really getting on. It's a 2.4 GHz Pentium 4 and like 768 megs of whatever RAM I could scrounge up. I wanna say the video card is a Geforce 4 MX.

I really need to look into replacing it. It's just a timebomb waiting to happen. It's a circa 2004 Dell Optiplex. Anybody working in an IT environment around that time will remember this as the model with a 90% failure rate due to capacitor plague.
Click to expand...

At this point you could probably just buy a cheap netbook to replace it
 
Oldest computer I have that's active (or semi-active) is an old X2-7750 with 4GB of memory and a 4830 card in it.

So not that old compared to most.

I do have some old Macs that see occasional use, mostly for nostalgia reasons:

-Powermac 6100 (60Mhz, 16MB, 250MB hard drive)
-Classic II (16Mhz, 2MB, 40MB hard drive)
 
BigDes said:
At this point you could probably just buy a cheap netbook to replace it
Click to expand...
As emulators grow more accurate for the old stuff, and support newer arcade machines, a netbook caliber CPU isn't going to do it for everything. A Core 2 Duo at decent clocks should be OK, but if buying new I'd go with an i3 to be sure.
 
Have a desktop that was built for gaming nearly a decade (2005) ago.

It's got a Pentium 4 3.0GHz CPU, 1 GB DDR2 RAM, and a ATI Radeon X800XL 256 MB GDDR3 graphics card. The hard disk is one of those early 80GB SATA Maxtors.

Not knowing much about PCs back then, I opted for a P4 instead of an Athlon64, which would have been the better choice. Going for the X800XL backfired in the long run as well since it only has up to DX9.0b support, which was very rapidly superseded by DX9.0c which is STILL the most widely used DX API for games to this very day thanks to the stagnation brought upon by console gaming and the slow uptake of Vista/DX10.

It's still used for word processing and internet browsing by the parents. Only have to clean the dust out of it once in a while.

My main laptop that I still use for everything (word processing, internet, gaming, programming etc.) is nearly 5 years old now (2009). Still does farely well with console ports on Steam.

It's got a Penryn Core 2 Duo T9550 @ 2.8 GHz, 8 GB DDR3 RAM (upgraded it from 4 when DDR3 RAM was dirt cheap sometime ago), and a ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4670 1 GB GDDR3 graphics card. Considered to be part of Extremely Low End PC Gaming GAF, it still surprises me at what it can do these days and just for kicks I like to try out the latest games on it to see how it fares.
 
I currently use a 2009 acer aspire one netbook. I bumped the ram up to 2GB, so right now I'm at that and 1.6 Ghz on windows starter. I couldn't watch 720p mkv's before I figured out a few tricks. Sometimes I can do 1080p if it's cold! lol I also had to download a program to change my wallpaper, because starter edition can't do it
 
ambientmystic said:
My main laptop that I still use for everything (word processing, internet, gaming, programming etc.) is nearly 5 years old now (2009). Still does farely well with console ports on Steam.

It's got a Penryn Core 2 Duo T9550 @ 2.8 GHz, 8 GB DDR3 RAM (upgraded it from 4 when DDR3 RAM was dirt cheap sometime ago), and a ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4670 1 GB GDDR3 graphics card. Considered to be part of Extremely Low End PC Gaming GAF, it still surprises me at what it can do these days and just for kicks I like to try out the latest games on it to see how it fares.
Click to expand...
My gaming/media desktop PC from 2008, still in active use, is also close to those specs. C2D @ 2.5GHz (never ended up taking advantage of the free OC, because... stupidity I guess?) and an EVGA 8800GTS 512MB. It has been an absolute joy to use; I hand picked all the parts for quality and noise level. Unlike you, I stopped even trying to play new intensive games a long time ago - would rather enjoy them fully after upgrading than do them the disservice of running them on this PC. But I have been pushing and pushing the upgrade back way longer than reasonable. Haven't even put a SSD in it because I have been "just about to upgrade" for the last two years. My Macbook Air destroys the PC in non-GPU performance so hard that it isn't even funny.
yes it is :-D

My plan now is to build a high-end system in about 2 months when my schedule clears up. Just thinking about it makes me drool - the performance jump from what I have should be around 5-10x. I just wish the GPU manufacturers were a bit more open about their upcoming products... and that Silverstone was a bit more open about the projected shipping dates of their already announced products. :-/
 
The Netburst Pentium 4's were really such terrible, inefficient performers.
Even the AMD Bobcat in my laptop can outperform the P4 Extreme Edition in most cases.
 
DonMigs85 said:
The Netburst Pentium 4's were really such terrible, inefficient performers.
Even the AMD Bobcat in my laptop can outperform the P4 Extreme Edition in most cases.
Click to expand...

That was Intel at its worst. AMD was doing really well at that time, but not as well as it could have though, due to the OEMs like Dell refusing to play ball with them and still prefering Intel's inefficient CPUs over theirs for their prebuilt PCs. Collusion was suspected and Intel was hauled to the courts for it.

Clock for clock the P4 was just bad, really bad.The jump from the P4 to the Core 2 was probably the most ridiculous one as a result.

Such gains wouldn't be seen again until the transition to Sandy Bridge in 2011.
 
ambientmystic said:
That was Intel at its worst. AMD was doing really well at that time, but not as well as it could have though, due to the OEMs like Dell refusing to play ball with them and still prefering Intel's inefficient CPUs over theirs for their prebuilt PCs. Collusion was suspected and Intel was hauled to the courts for it.

Clock for clock the P4 was just bad, really bad.The jump from the P4 to the Core 2 was probably the most ridiculous one as a result.

Such gains wouldn't be seen again until the transition to Sandy Bridge in 2011.
Click to expand...

At the time (2004-2005) I always wondered why the Athlon processors had much lower clock frequencies, but were just as fast or faster than the Pentium 4's. The reason why this happened was that Intel kept increasing the length of the processor's pipeline. That's basically the number of stages that one processor instruction has to go through to finish. Generally, there's 4 steps, the first one is to get the instruction from memory (Fetch), there's figuring out what the instruction does and which registers it uses (Decode), then there's doing the actual instruction (Execute) and finally putting the result back into memory (Store). It's a little more complicated than that, but those are the most important steps.

At the end, the Pentium 4s had a 31 stage pipeline. Such a long pipeline means that each stage of the pipline is very fast (since all they were doing was splitting up existing pipeline stages) which enables very fast clock speeds. The issue that Intel ran into was that silicon only really works efficiently with up to about 4 GHz, which led to the Core architecture with only 12-14 stages, lower clock speeds and most importantly, multiple processor cores on one die. Another issue that they had was that when an instruction was decoded and ready to execute, but the processor found that one of the registers it was supposed to write to is currently busy, it had to stall for a really long time. The Wikipedia article on the subject is quite good. This is an excellent article on modern processor architecture, which requires some prior knowledge but it's really, really good.
 
My comput0r is a core2duo@1.8, 3GB RAM, AMD 4670 and 1TB HD. Until last year I was running XP on a 160GB HD, but I finally made the upgrade to W7. :P Most games I've been playing run pretty decently on this setup, but I don't really play the super strenuous AAA shit on PC. I don't really foresee an upgrade for now due to my current needs. Having something faster would sure be nice though.
 
Up until last year, my parents were using an old Compaq Presario.
128mb RAM
12GB HDD
Zip Drive
3.5" Floppy
Pentium II

They tried to put XP on it and it pretty much killed it, so I swapped it out for Xubuntu and it worked OK. All they needed a computer for was basic games and email.
 
Zebra said:
My computer is about 11 years old.

It's an old HP pavilion.

512 MB of RAM
2.8 GHz Pentium 4 processor.
160 GB of storage
Nvidia GeForce 4 MX (64 mb)
Currently running Xubuntu.

It was a decent PC back in 2003. I could at least manage to run Half Life 2 on it, but the experience of using it now is... rough. :lol. Websites and programs are not optimized for this.

The web is an unpredictable place on this thing. It can only handle a few tabs open at a time. No HD video playing/streaming, that's for sure. It can handle up to 480p youtube videos, but not fullscreen. I can really only use the computer for basic web browsing.

Also, I can only use Chrome. Firefox works, but it is slow as hell and gifs just don't function on it. So what does Chrome mean with only 512 mb of RAM? It means crashes. Lots and lots of crashes.

Regarding the experience of browsing NeoGAF on it: I honestly wish there was a 25 posts per page option.

I'm sure someone can beat me in the awful specs department, so I wanted to see if there are any other dated PC users here. But I'm really only interested if you actually use the computer, and what the experience is like.
Click to expand...


no need to answer if you'd prefer not to. but why haven't you upgraded to say... a chromebook?
 
Mobile Sempron 3000+ 1,7GHz
S3G Unichrome Pro 64MB
15" XGA
512MB
80GB
Windows XP

was my main gaming machine at some point. It's the windows updates that have slowed it down, and poor web/browser design of today, otherwise it'd still be perfectly fine. I've tried ubuntu on it and it's even slower.
 
Fezan said:
My old pc at home.
Q6600 2.4
2gb ddr2 ram was 4 gb but some thing happened to slot
AMD 6780
Old CRT monitor 15 inch

My company laptop

Some dual core Toshiba laptop with 3gb of ram
Click to expand...
Damn, Q6600 is consider old now :(

This quad-core processor was top of the line in early 2008.
 
Dell Dimension 3100 bought in 2006 for $500
P4 @ 3 GHz
1 GB RAM (purchased w/ 256 MB)
Intel integrated video
250 GB & 500 GB HDD (purchased w/ 80 GB)
Win XP
17" 4:3 VGA Monitor

It has been running 24/7/365 for the most part since I bought it. It is my main PC for internet & email and some other stuff. I have 2 low end HTPCs (Core2Duo w/ 2GB ram & AMD E350 w/ 8 GB ram) for watching video, and a couple of other machines sitting around collecting dust.
 
My PC was bought in 2011 for £650.

Dual Core 3.2 GHZ (not sure which processor)
4GB RAM
Windows 7 ----------> Upgraded for free to 8.1 because I'm an IT student and get all MS software free.
Integrated graphics. This is so bad that if I watch YouTube in 1080p, my system starts to crash and can even force shut-down.
1TB HDD
23" 1080p monitor
 
Recently threw away my PC from when I was at college. This computer wasn't used but DID work.

Bought in 1994:
486 25mhz
4mb RAM
120mb HDD
Floppy drive (no CD)
No sound card
VGA monitor
Windows 3.11
 
Mine's also an HP Pavilion:

Intel® Pentium(R) 4 CPU 3.06GHz
Intel® 915G x86/MMX/SSE2
32-bit
200GB HD [with 1766 bad sectors >_< ]
2.5 GB of RAM [I installed extra rams, I guess originally it had 500mb]

Gets the job done I guess[can watch some HD videos] but the hard drive has been failing for a long while now so I need restart it often. The bad HD made Windows XP unusable so I installed Ubuntu Linux and it runs great[except for the reboots].
 
As someone who upgrades to literally the fastest thing possible every 5 years or so, this thread is literally killing me inside.
 
73wdq.jpg
Click to expand...

Not mine.
 
I had a Core 2 Duo E6600 (stock speed) with 2GB of RAM, a 9600GT and Windows XP until 3-4 months ago since 2006. It was ok, but with many Chrome tabs open you could tell it was not keeping up anymore, and also with videos, unless discharged into the GPU.

Since I don't game on PC I made myself a custom, fanless and very small form factor build with the newly released Celeron J1900 which is a 10W TDP quad core processor, 4GB of RAM and a mSSD. The funny thing is that gaming aside it performs so much better than the old rig, and this thing flies. An intensive, non-GPU decoded video like the Hi10p format puts the CPU up to 30-40% only. Same video was 90-95% on my old rig. CPUs have advanced a lot since the first Core processors. I also love the noiseless factor, I think I won't be able to go back to any computer with fans.
 
I have a real shitty motherboard that probably doesn't support more than 2GB DDR2 ram. I tried 4GB and it took like 5 restarts to get it working. Hopefully I can get a new computer soon.
 
first computer I ever had was like a laptop from 1996.

I was using this thing in like 2005, it had one of those weird-feeling rubber green things for a mouse.

I used to talk on yahoo messenger on it and if more than 1 person messaged me it would crash.

I remember going online and looking at Jessica Alba pics and it would take like 30 minutes to load one.
 
Atolm said:
Since I don't game on PC I made myself a custom, fanless and very small form factor build with the newly released Celeron J1900 which is a 10W TDP quad core processor, 4GB of RAM and a mSSD. The funny thing is that gaming aside it performs so much better than the old rig, and this thing flies.
Click to expand...

I've never heard of the Celeron J series before. According to Passmark, The Celeron J1900 seems to be on par with my laptop Core 2 Duo T9550 CPU which is much higher clocked in comparison, which is amazing for its ultra low TDP, but per core performance is much lower considering its 4 cores vs 2 cores for the Core 2. Definitely a heck of a lot more efficient.
 
I have a Compaq Presario 1700.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compaq_Presario_1700

My grandfather bought it when he was working in South Korea and gave it to me a few years later. It's not used regularly, but I still use it from time to time. The screen shows its age, the VGA port is busted (;_;), same with headphone out.

But it still works.

And for light web browsing it actually was decent a few years ago (the PCMCIA WiFi card broke), especially since I mostly just browse forums. Of course, until the GIFs come in huge quantity.
It also runs some older games in software mode better than the netbook we have as a portable computer at home (Half-Life worked worse on ANY mode, from what I remember, compared to the Compaq). Same with PSX emulation.
 
Zebra said:
My computer is about 11 years old.

It's an old HP pavilion.

512 MB of RAM
2.8 GHz Pentium 4 processor.
160 GB of storage
Nvidia GeForce 4 MX (64 mb)
Currently running Xubuntu.

It was a decent PC back in 2003. I could at least manage to run Half Life 2 on it, but the experience of using it now is... rough. :lol. Websites and programs are not optimized for this.

The web is an unpredictable place on this thing. It can only handle a few tabs open at a time. No HD video playing/streaming, that's for sure. It can handle up to 480p youtube videos, but not fullscreen. I can really only use the computer for basic web browsing.

Also, I can only use Chrome. Firefox works, but it is slow as hell and gifs just don't function on it. So what does Chrome mean with only 512 mb of RAM? It means crashes. Lots and lots of crashes.

Regarding the experience of browsing NeoGAF on it: I honestly wish there was a 25 posts per page option.

I'm sure someone can beat me in the awful specs department, so I wanted to see if there are any other dated PC users here. But I'm really only interested if you actually use the computer, and what the experience is like.
Click to expand...

It wouldn't happen to be a A250N would it? I had an HP computer that I got back in 2003 that seems very similar to yours.
 
Thinkpad T60 (14"):
Intel Core Duo processor T5500 (1.66GHz)
64MB ATI Mobility RADEON X1300

things added later:
4GB DDR2 (2GB x2)
Samsung 128GB SSD
Windows 7 Pro 32 bit

It was almost $3,000 back in 2006. still running lightning fast today.
 
I used a T40 to program things on the go before I got my other laptop. I'd still use it if it wasn't so heavy.

1 GB of RAM
something GB disk drive
1400×1050 display
dunno processor
 
Violentine said:
Thinkpad T60 (14"):
Intel Core Duo processor T5500 (1.66GHz)
64MB ATI Mobility RADEON X1300

things added later:
4GB DDR2 (2GB x2)
Samsung 128GB SSD
Windows 7 Pro 32 bit

It was almost $3,000 back in 2006. still running lightning fast today.
Click to expand...

That SSD is probably worth more than the resale value of your Thinkpad T60 at this point lol. I was thinking about adding one to my laptop but with the cost involved I'd be better off just buying a new one.

SSDs will make any old system basically CPU/RAM bound lol.
 
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