Slowest computer

What is the slowest computer you use on a regular basis (I don't mean some old thing you use as a firewall, but instead something you regularly put hands on to type emails to Aunt Millie or whatever)? Mine is a 486 (100 MHz, 20M RAM), though I also still use a PII-300.

Talking of Luddites...
Thursday, March 25, 2004

Sadly, it's this Thinkpad 1Ghz laptop I'm writing this on.

I have a 800MHz machine running Windows ME which is the backer-uper for my portable thing, but I'm not sure an ME box counts as a machine.

Even my firewall is a 1.3GHz machine: I went to the computer store after my aged P100's power supply went "phut!" and asked what the lowest spec box they could build was, and it turned out to be 1.3GHz and 128Mb of memory with 30Gb of disk, which is scary. I think it was 200 quid for just the box...

All I really wanted was a computer in which the PSU fan worked...

So work asked what spec laptop I needed. "Oh, it doesn't need to be fast. It's not like it's running Windows; it's only going to have X11 and a database on it..."

So I get issued with their lowest spec laptop. 2.4GHz and a Gb of ram.... <sigh>

When I think of the computing power going to waste, it's a crying shame.

Katie Lucas
Thursday, March 25, 2004

I still use my 7MHz Amiga 500.

Matthew Lock
Thursday, March 25, 2004

Pentium II 266MHz.

My mom uses one, and with 384MB of RAM, it actually doesn't feel that slow at all!

Dan Maas
Thursday, March 25, 2004

We keep a P160 with Win95 around to drive a printer as the NT driver mangled Avery labels. 

At home our two youngest have a P2 233Mhz each and my ZX80 has just turned up.  We're thinking of getting it working to frighten the children.

a cynic writes...
Thursday, March 25, 2004

4Mhz Saturn in my HP-48G handheld.

SG
Thursday, March 25, 2004

PIII 733 MHz at work.

John Topley (www.johntopley.com)
Thursday, March 25, 2004

My laptop is a PIII 850, although it runs slower (750MHz?) on batteries.  I have a PII400 which I use as a Linux development box, although I think it's dead.

MR
Thursday, March 25, 2004

Sometimes my mom's PII /350, with 128 megs of RAM, Windows XP. Still good enough for browsing and email.

I'm thinking of upgrading my computer's RAM, which is now 512MB - does it make any difference for general development to have more than that - 768 or 1GB? It's an old P3/850. I just don't want to post this as a new thread, but I'd like to know :)

TomA
Thursday, March 25, 2004

Sometimes I run my Spectrum 48k =D

...normally my two 800mhz MiniITX boxes would be it though. Good thing with those babies is that they require very little cooling so they are almost completely silent. (slightly modded)I have one for email and browsing and stuff, and one as a file and dev server. They are on 24/7.
I also have a 2.6mhz athlon and a couple of notebooks for other tasks.

Eric Debois
Thursday, March 25, 2004

P II 200 MHz.

Still perfectly adequate for email, web, a little wp, and my modest gaming needs.

A.T.
Thursday, March 25, 2004

I am typing this on a soon to be replaced Pentium 233 MMX with 128mb of ram and Win 2k Pro. It is slow, I cannot wait to throw it off a building. Other then that a relative of mine still does word processing on an early no math co-processor 486 with Word Perfect 6.0. She does work daily for the Catholic church so I think it was blessed and will never break!

Jeff
Thursday, March 25, 2004

> Talking of Luddites...

Just because you use mail(1) to send ascii on a 486DX with 8 megs of ram, you expect us to respect you? Using Slackware/OpenBSD doesn't make you 31337.

Li-fan Chen
Thursday, March 25, 2004

Jeff, if you use any software for that many years, even if it's running on plain old dos, you'd figure out where all the bugs are and avoid using the features that lead to it. How many of you know exactly the 2 biggest limitation of notepad before Windows NT came around and fixed it? I rest my case.

(I can't print this upside down) Answer: Size limitation, ascii only

Li-fan Chen
Thursday, March 25, 2004

I'd add the fact it crashes if you open a zero length file in it...

Katie Lucas
Thursday, March 25, 2004

>> Talking of Luddites...
>
>Just because you use mail(1) to send ascii on >a 486DX with 8 megs of ram, you expect us to >respect you? Using Slackware/OpenBSD doesn't >make you 31337.

Someone said it does? I was curious is all. Besides, it doesn't run Slackware it runs Debian and Win 95 (not at the same time, mind, I'm not sick enough to try and run vmware on it). I am of the same opinion as Katie, A.T. and maybe one or two others - there is simply no need for huge horsepower for many tasks. And wth, I'm just mean.

Talking of Luddites...
Thursday, March 25, 2004

31337 comment was just a j/k. :-)

Li-fan Chen
Thursday, March 25, 2004

Li-Fan, absolutly, that is why she sticks with it. What blows me away is that the cmos battery is still going strong and so is the hard drive. Her computer is I think almost 10 years old now (I think the reciept said 1993). For nothing to have broken in that time on a simple desktop machine I find to lucky.

Jeff
Thursday, March 25, 2004

Furry muff. I forgive you then ;-)

Talking of Luddites...
Thursday, March 25, 2004

P II 333 MHz.

I backup my real computer to its HD, and use it to surf, or do email when my wife's on the real computer.

anon
Thursday, March 25, 2004

P II 266 /w 128 MB RAM -- its used as a file server, backup destination, SVN server and is currently being used as a Vault test server.  It also has Red Hat 6.0 installed on it if I need to boot into Linux.  It takes forever to reboot W2K on the machine so I generally leave it running in W2K.  I've had no real issues with this machine.  I think I bought it in 97 or 98...

Billy Boy
Thursday, March 25, 2004

PII 400 Sony Picturebook when I'm sitting on the couch and want to surf a bit wirelessly.

Gerald
Thursday, March 25, 2004

Our standard home machine is an IBM/Cyrix 166Mhz 192Mb running W2K. It is just fine for Office type apps, but you can forget about running any kind of recent games though.

Just me (Sir to you)
Thursday, March 25, 2004

I'm typing this on a dual G5 with 4GB of ram.  But thats not the point.  I only use this for email.  I do all of my cgi/database development through ssh onto our FreeBSD server, PIII 700 or so with 256MB of ram.  Just thought I'd add to that 'waste of power' post above ;-)

Andrew Hurst
Thursday, March 25, 2004

Are you sure the 64KB size limitation was fixed in NT?  I've never used NT4 so I don't know. And Unicode came in with Windows 2000, so I don't see how NT solved the ASCII limitation.

At home my desktop is a 733Mhz PIII with 384MB of RAM (motherboard won't take any more). I have a 1.6 P4M laptop and a 2.0Ghz desktop and sometimes use the latest 2.8Ghz machines at work. I notice no difference whatsover in speed between any of the machines (except that the 2Ghz work machine is often the slowest because it only has 256MB of RAM and XP installed to eat up memory). In fact I'm most productive on the home desktop  because it's got the best monitor and chair.

If I did any serious programming or video editing I would notice the difference mind you.

Stephen Jones
Thursday, March 25, 2004

I run an old Sun Sparcstation LX as my imap/mail server at home.  I think it is 50 mhz?  It is also my SSH tunnel into my home network.

Bill Rushmore
Thursday, March 25, 2004

Jeff, I wouldn't be surprised at all if her replacement PC is a P4 2.8Gigahertz box running VMWare (hosting MS DOS 6.2 guest OS)

Li-fan Chen
Thursday, March 25, 2004

Bill,

if single task stuff counts we also have a Mac LC II (68020 @ 25Mhz?) running as a dedicated terminal.

Just me (Sir to you)
Thursday, March 25, 2004

p-75, 64MB ram, win95; HP Pavilion
use it to do my online banking everyday...

apw
Thursday, March 25, 2004

Stephen Jones,

Unicode was introduced in NT 3.1, not Windows 2000. The 32 bit windows have been Unicode since their creation.

And yes, the 64k limit in notepad was fixed in NT4. Actually, it was, again, fixed in NT 3.1.

Chris Tavares
Thursday, March 25, 2004

Chris is my phone a friend for Windows questions on Millionaire...

Li-fan Chen
Thursday, March 25, 2004

Live and learn! And here's silly me thinking Windows 98 was 32 bit.

Stephen Jones
Thursday, March 25, 2004

When I go back at my parents, I still use the PII-266 64 Megs Ram that runs on W95. It runs IE 5.5, PhotoShop 5, and Word 2000 pretty smoothly.

Anonymouche
Thursday, March 25, 2004

Hardware-wise, slowest would be my computer at work: PIII 866 MHz, 256 MB RAM, running Windows 2000. But in practice, the PIII 933 MHz 384 MB at home is noticeably slower, which probably can be blamed entirely on Windows Me. Soon as I get my act (and some spare cash) together, the RAM is getting maxed out to 512 MB and it's getting Windows XP put on. (No, that's not likely to make it faster, but at least it won't crash on the most random things. Hopefully.)

Martha
Thursday, March 25, 2004

I have a P133 with 80 megs of RAM running NT 4 Workstation that I use to back up files over a network.  Yeah, I could use that pile of blank CDR's, but this is more fun.

I guess.

Aaron F Stanton
Thursday, March 25, 2004

Texas Instruments TI-89 calculator.  It has either a 10 or 20 MHz processor and it can solve symbolic equations and other fancy tricks... a lot more than my desktop is capable of without investing $$$ in Maple or Matlab.

Friday, March 26, 2004

And don't forget, they introduced Ctrl+S shortcut in NT

Sulo
Friday, March 26, 2004

So, having established that many people use slow computers, who still believes that you need "the best tools money can buy", or is fit for purpose "good enough"?

Friday, March 26, 2004

Hey, we were talking computers in general use, not primary dev. machine, right?
Although the IBM/Cyrix 686 is use as a general office machine, I wouldn't dream of having it as the day to day dev machine. For that I'm using a P4 1.8Ghz workstation and a P4 2.4Ghz server combo. Is it "the best money can buy"? Of course not, but it is "good value".

Just me (Sir to you)
Friday, March 26, 2004

For sure. I'm not saying that one doesn't need a fast computer to compile on, though I do wonder whether all the people in the office need their own when actually they spend most of their time reading/writing text files (if you are using a Java based editor you are excused).

What is more, since it seems to be difficult to buy 486's these days I'm willing to sell mine for, oooh, (quick, how much would katie's laptop cost?) anyway, that much.

Friday, March 26, 2004

I use my 66Mhz PPC regularly for testing software for speed and compatibility issues, for printing and scanning (expensive printer and scanner don't work with the newer machine, no drivers) and running a few programs that don't work on newer machines without paying for an upgrade. It was actually my main development machine until 2003. Interestingly, running the older version of the compiler, it works as fast building an identical project from scratch as my machine that is technically more than thirty times faster.

Scott
Friday, March 26, 2004

"Interestingly, running the older version of the compiler, it works as fast building an identical project from scratch as my machine that is technically more than thirty times faster. "

Man, that's just really sad for so many reasons.

Aaron F Stanton
Friday, March 26, 2004

IBM X445 with 4 2.8 ghz, 10 gigs of ram and a FastT600 Fibre array

Slummin
Tuesday, March 30, 2004

Slummin,

if you are using that machine mainly for webbrowsing I would advice replacing the 2400 baud acoustic coupler to someting more modern. No need to replace the other components, they seem fine. It's the modem that is slowing you down.

Just me (Sir to you)
Wednesday, March 31, 2004

P-100 laptop with 40MB RAM.  Still kind of usable with text-only Linux

Motown (AU)
Wednesday, March 31, 2004

I have used processors down to 20Mhz with only 4k words of memory. It is still fast enough to run various lights (clap activated) etc around my room via a micro-serial port.

I have also used a 4Mhz Processor for various projects but this is just a little too slow for my liking.

Anonymous
Tuesday, June 29, 2004

I am using a inspiron 4100 1.03 mhz 512 ram and a insprion 9100 3.2 mhz 1 gb memory

richard small
Sunday, August 29, 2004

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