It's amazing how quickly things advance in technology. What was speedy and cutting edge just a few years ago now seems sluggish and poor value for money, with PCs being one of the worst culprits.
In a bid to amuse ourselves and give us a chance to reminisce, we decided to speed test a PC that had been sent to our labs for testing, some eleven years ago, and was never returned to its rightful owner.
The PC that time forgot!
It's hard to determine exactly when or where this PC came from; our best experts have been able to backdate the unit to January of 1999, when it may have been delivered as part of a budget machine roundup.
After carefully wiping away the dust and grime of time to expose a set of vintage MFPC serial numbers, we did what any sane optimisation-obsessed tester would do: we set this one-of-a-kind 'My Favourite PC' up for a few rounds of hardcore performance testing.
This is where the adventure begins. First we had to install the latest version of our WorldBench 6 testing software, which meant replacing the default Windows 98 with a fresh install of Windows 7 Starter Edition. Reformatting proved to be just the first step down this retro rabbit hole; to get Windows 7 operational, we had to toss out the factory-installed 32MB of 133 SDRAM and slot in a pair of 256MB SDRAM sticks we dug out of an old supply closet.
The old 512MB hard drive was junked in favour of a (comparatively) massive new 160GB hard drive capable of bearing a bare-bones Win7 install and a copy of our benchmarking software. Finally, with the end in sight we hooked up the 100watt power supply and booted into Windows with a BIOS update and a prayer.
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Comments
Sirjohng said: I am writing this on a 6 year old Dell Latitude 640 laptop on Win7 Pentium 4 - 18Mhz CPU 1MB DDR RAM 32MB DDR RAM on-board graphics and a new Hitachi 160GB hard drive with 8MB buffer I have a PCMCIA USB2 dongle cost 7 from Amazon with a permanent 4GB flash drive for Readyboost which helps no end Goes like a train
Sirjohng said: I think we are on a merry-go-round of bloated software demanding bloated hardware Win7 had to be reduced from Vista in order to stand a chance of running on netbooks so we know bloat is not necessary but just a tool to keep companies like Microsoft and their Ilk in business After allwith the world now running primarily on Windows we must have Microsoft to keep everything going
Gary Gemmell said: I love the old hardware interesting articlesHas anyone ever tested how fast Windows 31 or 98 would be on a dual core modern pc Probably to fast to use methinksThere is no excuse for bloatware - when I was a games programmer for the beeb we had 20k to fit massive graphics routines and a full arcade game into which we did Modern compilers and high level programming code produces huge routines and bloat there is little optimisationProgrammers in my day used to know what RLL compression and collage theorem were and how to write floating point machine code mathsWhat do they teach em now at college I wonderWindows 7 is 10 times bigger than it should be codewise - they should go back to the beginning and write something from the ground up - assembler or mc would be nice - you would see the smallest and fastest operating system ever that would run on anything from a washing machine firmware chip to a multicore megacomputer
Gary Gemmell said: Interesting to see windows 7 will run on such an old pc howeverRant overgto
Bajab said: I am wondering just how much better it would have ran with win 7 drivers written for this specific hardware As I doubt win 7 was actually getting the most out of the hardware without them
Druid said: Surely if you are going to carry out this exercise then you need to use the operating system that was used on this computer at that time ie Windows 98 Then use a benchmark program that will run on both new and old operating systems This will then give a more accurate measurment for a benchmark score for comparison between old and new systems Trying to run Windows 7 on an old system is essentially meaningless as it was not designed to run on that system and would give you a very false benchmark score As surjohnng has found old systems appear to work at lightning speed compared to the more recent offerings we now have I
Bajab said: I am wondering just how much better it would have ran with win 7 drivers written for this specific hardware As I doubt win 7 was actually getting the most out of the hardware without them
sirjohng said: I have kept an old PC - Pentium 90 64MB Simm RAM 15GB hard drive and integrated graphics It has Win98 MS Office 97 Sage Accounts V42 and IE I dug it out recently hooked it up to a modern flat screen monitor and the Internet and away it went at near light speed - I kid you not This PC will still run a small office albeit without direct HMRC connectivity for Sage I may try loading Lynux sometime for the fun of it
Ben said: One artical claims that Windows 7 is faster than Vista as possibly a myth then the very next artical i read says the opposite