It took awhile before PCs really caught up with the demands that a full-fledged Active Desktop would put on them. I remember trying it on my 83MHz Pentium with 16MB of RAM, and later a 233MHz Pentium II with 32MB of RAM, both without much success.

Towards the early 2000s, I was using it successfully on an Athlon XP with 256MB of RAM, displaying some live-updating weather widgets. That worked wonderfully, and actually felt like a great use of Active Desktop. Screenshot: https://hardwarehacks.org/lt/bcweather4tn.jpg

I remember writing an "active desktop" page (the desktop was really just a fullscreen -minus taskbar- IE control) that had some green-and-black background and assembly code scrolling at the side ala Terminator (the code was for some DOS VGA mode 13h effect i'd written) as it felt very hackerish to have a desktop like that.

Around 1-2 days later i disable it since it was constantly eating all of my (200MHz Pentium) CPU time, visibly making everything feel slower :-P.