To the author of the article “Experiment: What can I squeeze 166 megahertz from Pentium?”
I began to write a comment in a new post from the "Antiques" section , but something went wrong ...
In general, I liked the source material. I also had a very similar computer a couple of years ago, then I threw it away because I was tired of messing around. There was exactly the same VIA mother, the same Pentium MMX 166, but 32 MB of memory, the S3 Trio64 VX / DX and the Opti931 sound engine. The comp was also around 97 years old, but I got it from a friend. What are my comments and personal experience? And here:
- the dust in the system unit is still recruited. The MID tower tower under AT is no ergonomic than modern towers, and the build quality is the same. The amount of dust depends on the environment, if it was clean, then there is no dust.
- I managed to increase the RAM to 128 MB, putting 4 SIMM strips of 32 meters each.
- I did not have a USB controller for PCI, but there was a card reader, and there was a USB 1.1 connector on the motherboard. I picked up the pinout, connected it - it worked.
- the hard drive was originally a WD of 2 gigabytes, I set another to 20 Gigabytes. To see the BIOS, he made the first 2 GB partition on FAT16 on another machine. Otherwise, for some reason, the screw was not detected at all.
- The CD-ROM was 24-speed and read perfectly both CD-R and RW. I don’t know why the author didn’t read them ...
- about the software. The highest performance on such a machine was achieved under MS Windows 95. I even have a license for it, by the way :). The problem was only in USB, which was officially supported under Win 95 OSR 2.1, but there really was no firewood for specific devices. And yes, do not forget that most of the drivers for the 95th were compatible with OS / 2 and in some cases were written by IBM itself. In short, they did not think about USB then.
I tried to put a variety of Linux on the machine. I actually managed to install PuppyRus and the old Fedora Core 3. Why the author installed even more ancient OSs and ancient Netscape - I don’t understand. I started running Opera 9, Russian fonts looked great. Flash did not work, because the CPU is too weak (by the way, I overclocked it to 188 MHz).
Here he is, handsome:
My maximum goal was 2 points: accessing the Internet via Bluetooth + GPRS and watching movies. Compressed MPEG4 went full screen in slideshow mode, so I had to be content with ordinary MPEG2. On a 14-inch monitor, the quality was fine.
The first goal was formally achieved, but it was almost impossible to actually use the Internet. The Bluetooth and USB subsystem loaded the CPU so that the browser was barely working. The Internet also drove wildly slowly (on GPRS it is already not so fast). In short, I had to abandon Internet surfing. But with the films, everything burned out. Later, I was even able to abandon full Linux and switch to the portable MOVIX distribution. This is done this way: the system is loaded from a bootable CD with Movix, on which there is a small Linux and Mplayer with all codecs. The OS is loaded into RAM, the CD is removed and a CD with a movie (650-700 MB) is loaded into the computer, which must be transcoded in advance to MPEG 2 on the "big" machine and taken with you. The films went perfectly, without lags and with complete control of the situation from the keyboard. The only drawback is that the CD-ROM roared like a vacuum cleaner (yes, I know about hdparm -E, but then the film slowed down), which in the end led me to disappointment. Still, a person spoiled by modern speed is somehow not comfortable picking such old cars. Now I have Peintium 4 with ubuntu in that place - but that's another story.
PS I noticed that the author of the original topic elegantly laundered the system unit and keyboard with the mouse. For accuracy - respect!
In general, I liked the source material. I also had a very similar computer a couple of years ago, then I threw it away because I was tired of messing around. There was exactly the same VIA mother, the same Pentium MMX 166, but 32 MB of memory, the S3 Trio64 VX / DX and the Opti931 sound engine. The comp was also around 97 years old, but I got it from a friend. What are my comments and personal experience? And here:
- the dust in the system unit is still recruited. The MID tower tower under AT is no ergonomic than modern towers, and the build quality is the same. The amount of dust depends on the environment, if it was clean, then there is no dust.
- I managed to increase the RAM to 128 MB, putting 4 SIMM strips of 32 meters each.
- I did not have a USB controller for PCI, but there was a card reader, and there was a USB 1.1 connector on the motherboard. I picked up the pinout, connected it - it worked.
- the hard drive was originally a WD of 2 gigabytes, I set another to 20 Gigabytes. To see the BIOS, he made the first 2 GB partition on FAT16 on another machine. Otherwise, for some reason, the screw was not detected at all.
- The CD-ROM was 24-speed and read perfectly both CD-R and RW. I don’t know why the author didn’t read them ...
- about the software. The highest performance on such a machine was achieved under MS Windows 95. I even have a license for it, by the way :). The problem was only in USB, which was officially supported under Win 95 OSR 2.1, but there really was no firewood for specific devices. And yes, do not forget that most of the drivers for the 95th were compatible with OS / 2 and in some cases were written by IBM itself. In short, they did not think about USB then.
I tried to put a variety of Linux on the machine. I actually managed to install PuppyRus and the old Fedora Core 3. Why the author installed even more ancient OSs and ancient Netscape - I don’t understand. I started running Opera 9, Russian fonts looked great. Flash did not work, because the CPU is too weak (by the way, I overclocked it to 188 MHz).
Here he is, handsome:
My maximum goal was 2 points: accessing the Internet via Bluetooth + GPRS and watching movies. Compressed MPEG4 went full screen in slideshow mode, so I had to be content with ordinary MPEG2. On a 14-inch monitor, the quality was fine.
The first goal was formally achieved, but it was almost impossible to actually use the Internet. The Bluetooth and USB subsystem loaded the CPU so that the browser was barely working. The Internet also drove wildly slowly (on GPRS it is already not so fast). In short, I had to abandon Internet surfing. But with the films, everything burned out. Later, I was even able to abandon full Linux and switch to the portable MOVIX distribution. This is done this way: the system is loaded from a bootable CD with Movix, on which there is a small Linux and Mplayer with all codecs. The OS is loaded into RAM, the CD is removed and a CD with a movie (650-700 MB) is loaded into the computer, which must be transcoded in advance to MPEG 2 on the "big" machine and taken with you. The films went perfectly, without lags and with complete control of the situation from the keyboard. The only drawback is that the CD-ROM roared like a vacuum cleaner (yes, I know about hdparm -E, but then the film slowed down), which in the end led me to disappointment. Still, a person spoiled by modern speed is somehow not comfortable picking such old cars. Now I have Peintium 4 with ubuntu in that place - but that's another story.
PS I noticed that the author of the original topic elegantly laundered the system unit and keyboard with the mouse. For accuracy - respect!