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I may have mentioned before that I have been restoring some vintage computers; this has been taking up a LOT of time, but I was moved to write this by KoDorSean's "My Rant" about his Windows 2000 computer with 128 MB of RAM.
I have just finished restoring an old Pentium Pro 200 (yes, that is 200 MHz folks, or in today's terms, 0.2 GHz). It has a whopping 64 MB of RAM and two 2.0 GB hard drives - all big stuff for its day, which was about 1996. Oh, and it has a 4 MB Diamond Stealth 3D 2000 video card... 4 MB! Zowie. Today's cards have 256 MB. I loaded the machine with Windows NT 4.0, which was the OS of the day that the Pentium Pro 200 was usually paired with, and I was amazed at how zippy and powerful it felt. It makes me wonder what Microsoft and everyone else has been up to with all the software bloat. The target of KoDorSean's rant is a dream machine compared to this!
...that doesn't lessen KoDorSean's pain of course. Read on...
I guess it all comes down to running software that is appropriate to the processing power you have available, but I am amazed at how productive you can be in a 0.2 GHz environment. It won't do video calling, but it *will* do email, web browsing, good 'ol Office 97 (spreadsheets, documents, chart sets ... I am hearing echos of the "Hi I'm a Mac" ads!
) and the like. Amazing, truly amazing. Of course, KoDorSean is NOT running age appropriate software on his old antique - he is running TODAY's software, and I agree, that is s-l-o-o-o-w!
BTW, I loaded Firefox 2.0 and Thunderbird 2.0 on this machine (kudos to Mozilla for doing such a great job of maintaining backward compatibility) and they both run great, but very, very slow!
Anway, I am taking the big leap now and not restoring an existing machine, but rather building a new one totally from scratch. That should be fun. It will be a dual core Pentium Pro 200 this time. Dual Core! Who Knew! Intel was pushing dual core motherboards way back in 1996 - two Pentium Pro 200s per motherboard, paired with Windows NT, which supported SMP.
Anyway, I will post some photos shortly of my current single core Pentium Pro 200 restoration, if there is any interest, and the dual core as it progresses. I am thinking of building a few and selling some on eBay!
Yes, I am a nerd! My inner engineer needs to play now and then!
I have just finished restoring an old Pentium Pro 200 (yes, that is 200 MHz folks, or in today's terms, 0.2 GHz). It has a whopping 64 MB of RAM and two 2.0 GB hard drives - all big stuff for its day, which was about 1996. Oh, and it has a 4 MB Diamond Stealth 3D 2000 video card... 4 MB! Zowie. Today's cards have 256 MB. I loaded the machine with Windows NT 4.0, which was the OS of the day that the Pentium Pro 200 was usually paired with, and I was amazed at how zippy and powerful it felt. It makes me wonder what Microsoft and everyone else has been up to with all the software bloat. The target of KoDorSean's rant is a dream machine compared to this!
...that doesn't lessen KoDorSean's pain of course. Read on...
I guess it all comes down to running software that is appropriate to the processing power you have available, but I am amazed at how productive you can be in a 0.2 GHz environment. It won't do video calling, but it *will* do email, web browsing, good 'ol Office 97 (spreadsheets, documents, chart sets ... I am hearing echos of the "Hi I'm a Mac" ads!
) and the like. Amazing, truly amazing. Of course, KoDorSean is NOT running age appropriate software on his old antique - he is running TODAY's software, and I agree, that is s-l-o-o-o-w!BTW, I loaded Firefox 2.0 and Thunderbird 2.0 on this machine (kudos to Mozilla for doing such a great job of maintaining backward compatibility) and they both run great, but very, very slow!
Anway, I am taking the big leap now and not restoring an existing machine, but rather building a new one totally from scratch. That should be fun. It will be a dual core Pentium Pro 200 this time. Dual Core! Who Knew! Intel was pushing dual core motherboards way back in 1996 - two Pentium Pro 200s per motherboard, paired with Windows NT, which supported SMP.
Anyway, I will post some photos shortly of my current single core Pentium Pro 200 restoration, if there is any interest, and the dual core as it progresses. I am thinking of building a few and selling some on eBay!
Yes, I am a nerd! My inner engineer needs to play now and then!
