The Official PC building thread - 4th Edition

The most I can think of, Omega, is flash based stuff. Flash is very intense. Just give it lots of RAM and it should be alright for the most part. The 2GHz Pentium 4 sucks though and if it can be replaced that should be done as well.

 

Ha ha! That made me laugh. You are right of course. I have discovered that about flash. My 1.4Ghz athlon thunderbird system could barely handle netflix and some websites would kind of stutter. My mothers current configuration on it is REALLY bad.
America Online. Need I say more? It just plain dogs down a system. Unless you have a crapload of ram, a decent hard drive, and good processor. But my hopes are to reformat the drive, and install only the bare essentials. E.g. adobe flash, Google Chrome(Firefox is rather craptastic at the moment).

Thanks for your opinions. I figured the ol girl could survive a little longer. Unfortunately they DO want a new monitor for it. And I believe the max supported resolution for that boards integrated graphics is not very high. Not very high at all(not even 1680 x 1050). I'm likely gonna have to throw my remaining AGP card in it. Or find an old PCI graphics card. That should prove challenging :S

By the way, I'm not basing that resolution on the current monitor. I looked up the integrated chip at one time. I remember being appalled at how low the max resolution was. Don't remember, but it was substantially lower than the typical...

 

Don't worry, eventually flash will be replaced by HTML5, and will be a distant memory

 

I doubt that maybe in 7/8 years

 

Kevin,

A Pentium 4 with Seven and an AV Suite could kill the machine. If you use Seven turn off all of the fancy features, especially Aero, and use your AVG Internet Security 2012 with Resident Shield and possibly IPS shut-off this should take some of the overhead off the PC and speed things up. I've loaded up a P4 like your doing and it ran a bit slow but wasn't too bad after doing the following. Hope that helps....

Stevo

P.S. A week or so ago NewEgg had the OCZ SSD Agility 3 120GB for $125 shipped wish I could have snatched it!

 

Quite possibly a bit sooner than that. Apple not supporting flash was a serious blow to them, and even Adobe are doing some HTML5 work now, I don't flash will disappear for a few years, but it should start having less dominance (the sooner the better imo)

 

these massive unmovable flash adds that are ontop of peoples posts, that you cant get rid off are REALLY anoying.

 

Tell me about it. They've been here for at least a month or two, and no sign of them going away unfortunately...

 

The 1.4 I spoke of could run windows 7. It was merely the Ram that held it back. It had 2Gb, and it always hovered around 70 - 80% usage. Yes, aero had to be shut off. The "WEI" was very low LOL!

I guess I could give XP the windows 7 facelift. I saw a youtube video of a guy running XP, that looked really similar to '7'. I guess I should ask my step dad if windows 7 is really critical anyhow. Probably not.

That HTML5 sounds interesting!

 

If you use Adblock Plus you won't see them, I tried Firefox with ABP but Firefox just sucks these days so I'm using Iron (a Chrome alternative) right now. I will try IE with ABP down the road here and see if that works too but I do like having the spell checker feature that Chrome & FF have.

 

if your just using it to browse the net i would just load up Windows 2000 on it, and if you must have fancies use Windows blinds. my old Slot A system runs it very well.

 

An intriguing thought. I have 2000 laying around somewhere. But I hate to load up a VERY outdated system, and encounter compatibility issues down the road.

I have a program called style xp, which was wonderful for XP in its day. I'd really like to tweak windows 7 stylishly speaking. But I suppose I'm content with its look for now.

That old gateway handles XP ok. It's the stuff that's loaded up on it that slows it down. AOL in particular. I bet Chrome would run every bit as smooth as todays computers on it.

I plan to open it up today, and see if it has an AGP port. I don't think it does. I guess I don't have to open it up. CPU-Z should be able to tell me the board, and then a google search It definitely needs something better than the integrated! Badly! LOL! Although I am sitting on a board/Cpu that has AGP. I have to talk with them about their options.

 

the driver Interface is identical to that of XP. nearly all XP drivers will work under win2000.

Win2000 and XP are practically identical at the core. its what was and was not built onto the core that's important.

 

That's true 2K might even be better and it is comparable to XP but much less over head, good suggestion.

As to plugins I have played with Ghostery Creaky I'll have to try that one sounds good thanks.....

Stevo

 

True but AD is going down the pan in general - routinely the site will be inaccessible for long periods returning 'oops, could not process request' error pages - you can only sometimes quick-quote other people's messages (sometimes it returns an error about not being able to find the message) and the site staff have announced no plans to fix the long-running new page bug. I do honestly wonder if the site is in such a state that one day it will go down for good.

 

Well, I just found some documentation about the board(Intel D845BG). Apparently it does have AGP. Which is good. The Nvidia card I have might correct some screen redraw issues I'm seeing. Unless something else is causing it :S

My afterdawn experience is generally good :S

 

No doubt about that I've experienced site problems like that too, it probably won't be long and AD will have to start new or do a serious purge on threads and nasties on the site.

 

Sam,

Perhaps it's this way where you are, but I get very few problems with AD, not even the double post or new page issue. In fact, I only complained a couple of times about problems that were minor, but annoying, and they seemed to be resolved quickly I can only think of once where it wasn't accessible, and that was some sort of server error after they upgraded the software. It's been more reliable than my email. Even Verizon has only been down a few times in the last 6 years, and that is usually weather related. I don't think I have ever gotten an error message either. I wonder why it doesn't happen here? That leads me to believe that your problems may be related to your ISP.

Russ