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Comment by oynqr | Hacker News Reader

A period correct Windows 7 era machine is something like a Core 2 Quad with 4-8 gigs of RAM, I'd hope that even the worst modern web abomination runs on that.

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The vast majority of systems back then had Core 2 Duos, modern web apps (or overcomplicated sites) can easily choke those.

I was using a Core2 Duo with 4GB as my main home computer until about a year ago, and while some sites made it run slowly (mostly recipe sites and others with a lot of video ads) it was certainly still usable. The trick was to keep the browser down below 10 or so tabs and close it when I needed to use some other heavy piece of software.

Interesting, maybe it actually is Firefox being slower than chromium, but incidentally a few days ago I was trying to make an old core 2 duo laptop a browser-only machine for a friend's kid, and with debian 12 and Firefox, the start page of YouTube with no video playing had both cores hover at around 70%. The page worked but was notably slow. Videos played smoothly. So I guess if you don't mind the fans spinning constantly it's usable, but eh...

Google regularly tries to break Firefox, Chromium probably works a lot better, if you can convince it to use GPU acceleration on Linux.

> if you can convince it to use GPU acceleration on Linux.

which isnt all that difficult, btw :)

good to point out that it's not enabled by default.

Yes, it's not difficult, but if you compare default settings it'll skew the results.

You probably didn’t have Hardware Video Decoding enabled in the browser, that’s still not the default on Linux.

But as said, that was on the landing page with no video playing. What is it even doing there that can load up the CPU like that? I was rather surprised then that playback was actually smooth at least at 480p. Otoh I doubt core2duo had any sort of hardware acceleration for video decoding, but don't quote me on that...

> I doubt core2duo had any sort of hardware acceleration for video decoding

That would be the job of the GPU anyway, but H.264 decoding was pretty much standard back then. That's why plugins like h264ify[0] exist for old hardware.

[0] https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/h264ify/aleakchihdc...

> That's why plugins like h264ify[0] exist for old hardware.

Which the intel GMA GPU's did not support in core2duo era. Those features were added by their gen5 (ironlake) GPU, the first intel HD gpu.

X4500HD introduced H.264 decoding on the last Core 2 generation

https://web.archive.org/web/20120620155937/http://intellinux...

edit: turns out this was never merged and attempts to get the old code running on a modern stack were not successful

https://github.com/intel/intel-vaapi-driver/issues/544

Hah nice digging, that issue was an interesting read. I will definitely check the IGD version of that laptop.

Make sure to use an ad blocker and turn off that weird Ambient mode graphical effect that just kills framerate. Videos should play fine after that on a Core 2 Duo if you have hardware accelerated decoding enabled.

I just donated a couple of ~20 year old Vista machines.

One was an Athlon; the other was a Core Duo. They both had 1GB RAM.

Donated to who??? Isnt that like donating your old socks?

https://www.computercorps.org/

but I don't think they take old socks.

You make that sound like it’s a bad thing

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1993/12/28/...

Our first computer was an MS-Dos machine that our local high school were getting rid of back in 1994. I learned a lot from playing around on the machine, trying to understand the command line.

This is a different time though, computing resources are ubiquitous and cheap. I'm not sure what anyone can do with a 20 year old machine

I have machines like that and it runs OK if you have a SSD, and more than 8GB of ram definitely helps.

Hopefully you can read hackernews without an SSD and many GBs

To be fair, you can also read Hacker News in links, so if that's your only goal, Chromium is overkill.

You can. Old reddit as well. I do that regularly on a 1st gen Atom netbook with 1GB of RAM and no SSD.

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