Great real life experiment @Albuquerque thanks!
SSD in sata 1.0 system
- Thread starter Davros
- Start date
Blazkowicz
Legend
You might try something like Smtube player, or a firefox extension to open youtube pages/links in VLC or other external players. Or try to find some tasks that don't require a million gigahertz to do.
I love seeing a web page take up like 40 billions CPU cycles to load the content (comments loaded and processed by javascript, I'm talking 100% CPU bound task for that part even on slow internet) . Why, oh why, with that many CPU cycles I could have played Quake for a couple minutes or more.
I love seeing a web page take up like 40 billions CPU cycles to load the content (comments loaded and processed by javascript, I'm talking 100% CPU bound task for that part even on slow internet) . Why, oh why, with that many CPU cycles I could have played Quake for a couple minutes or more.
I was about -> <- this far away from posting a work-unfriendly internet meme of how many eff's I have to give about making that old laptop perform better for web browsing 
You know, something like this! (don't click me at work!)
I was using it only for checking out pre-prod builds of Win10, and it got a "real" version of Win10 when the OS finally went RTM. Other than as a technical curiosity, it wasn't worth mucking with. I still have it somewhere, maybe if I'm feeling bored I'll take a video of it booting
You know, something like this! (don't click me at work!)I was using it only for checking out pre-prod builds of Win10, and it got a "real" version of Win10 when the OS finally went RTM. Other than as a technical curiosity, it wasn't worth mucking with. I still have it somewhere, maybe if I'm feeling bored I'll take a video of it booting
Thats ridiculous when all we needed to decode dvd in software was a 300mhz pentium 2
Blazkowicz
Legend
I expected to not laugh, then...
I will try to acquire a few of such laptops now that they're worthless, they can be used as "slaves" to a linux desktop e.g. have two of them on the desk, each running a command line window ; or a more interesting task like a music player + file manager. Some bars/pubs do use those little dumb things to run the music (with e.g. winamp)
If I were to run Windows 10 Pro (on desktop), first things installed would be the "windows services for linux" with "bash on ubuntu on windows".
I will try to acquire a few of such laptops now that they're worthless, they can be used as "slaves" to a linux desktop e.g. have two of them on the desk, each running a command line window ; or a more interesting task like a music player + file manager. Some bars/pubs do use those little dumb things to run the music (with e.g. winamp)
If I were to run Windows 10 Pro (on desktop), first things installed would be the "windows services for linux" with "bash on ubuntu on windows".
Blazkowicz
Legend
On these old computers everything other than video decoding was accelerated (though, partial or full MPEG2 hardware decoding did exist as well). YUV to RGB conversion, scaling (to e.g. 1024x768 or 1280x1024, modulo letterbox) and maybe something I'm missing ; it was the Overlay mode. No wasteful copying to memory of the scaled video either (just display it). I believe it still exists and is still used in standalone video players (otherwise, there are DirectX, OpenGL etc. output paths).
The S3 Vision 868 and S3 Vision 968 graphics cards could do that. They were available in PCI and VLB versions.
But for some reason web browsers cannot use or don't want to use that, and I've spent a decade complaining to strangers on the internet lol (or trying to convince acquaintances/friends to download not stream, or listen to music in other ways than with the youtube website)
There might be odd limitations with overlay mode. But anyway, if the video rendering is fully accelerated (typically with H264 codec and up), then the browsers do support that and any bottom of the barrel, outdated phone/tablet significantly worse than Atom N270 and friends can do 1080p decoding and playback without breaking a sweat (720p if too old/limited)
/edit :
I remember now, that when you took a screenshot of your windows 98 desktop etc. with a video playing, the media player window would not show the video, it was blank/fully black. Spooky.
The S3 Vision 868 and S3 Vision 968 graphics cards could do that. They were available in PCI and VLB versions.
But for some reason web browsers cannot use or don't want to use that, and I've spent a decade complaining to strangers on the internet lol (or trying to convince acquaintances/friends to download not stream, or listen to music in other ways than with the youtube website)
There might be odd limitations with overlay mode. But anyway, if the video rendering is fully accelerated (typically with H264 codec and up), then the browsers do support that and any bottom of the barrel, outdated phone/tablet significantly worse than Atom N270 and friends can do 1080p decoding and playback without breaking a sweat (720p if too old/limited)
/edit :
I remember now, that when you took a screenshot of your windows 98 desktop etc. with a video playing, the media player window would not show the video, it was blank/fully black. Spooky.
Last edited:
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