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Back in 2005, my first PC was somewhat underpowered:
- Some ASRock motherboard with S3 Pro Savage onboard graphics
- Celeron 2.0Ghz
- 256+128MiB of RAM
- 10GB HDD
Yet I was still able to do everyday computing with WinXP, Office 2003, and play a plenty of games on it, such as Counter-Strike and Heroes 3. The CPU is even fast enough to play RTS games like Age of Empires and StarCraft. More complex 3D games like Warcraft III is possible after I added a GeForce2 MX400 32MiB. Some Internet cafe even used the terrible Celeron 1.0Ghz, paired with the above mentioned video card, to run 3D games like MU Online very well. Web browsing using Internet Explorer 6-7-8 felt smooth.
And today, I dug up an ancient computer which was once my dream:
- A socket 478 motherboard with chipset 845G
- Pentium 4 2.8Ghz (single core with no model number)
- 512 + 256MiB of RAM
- Maxtor 20GB ATA HDD
With a lightweight Puppy Linux 5.2.8 installed, I found it impossible to do basic web browsing. I've tried a few different browsers, the result is the same: 100% CPU load, 10-15 seconds to load a simple website, sluggish performance, and complex sites like YouTube takes forever to load. I still had a lot of unused RAM.
What has changed in the world of web development that makes simple browsing no longer possible on a Pentium 4?
4This page is using 75MB RAM on my machine, a YouTube page 250MB. Plus 150MB for the browser, plus the OS itself - that's your RAM nearly eaten in 2 pages. You're going to be running hard into pagefile too. A web page 15 years ago could be measured in KB. – Tetsujin – 2019-05-09T08:56:51.797