It's amazing how quickly things advance in technology, with PCs being one of the worst culprits. What seemed speedy and cutting edge just a few years ago, now seems sluggish and poor value for money. 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.
Once we got WorldBench 6 up and running, the machine failed 7 of the 10 consumer app tests right from the start. Without a full-sized motherboard, we couldn't even install a 3D graphics card (no PCI or AGP slots), and were forced to rely on an integrated graphics chipset installed during the late 90s as the machine limped through our Adobe Photoshop and video encoding tests.
Here's our results:
For reference, the average budget desktop scores around the 100point mark in WorldBench 6. My Favourite PC scored a five, and even earning that was a gruelling process as the 400MHz processor spent days chugging through Firefox and Microsoft Office tests that normally take 6 to 8 hours on a post-Y2K budget PC. For comparison purposes, here's the same test results from the recently-reviewed Viewsonic VPC 190 a budget all-in-one PC.
So what have we learned from our upgrade experiment?
- Windows 7 runs exceptionally well on an old machine, an impressive feat given the system hog that was Vista.
- With a little love, even a decade-old PC can be useful as a dedicated iternet machine for a small business or tech-phobic family member.
See also: 10 great tools to test your PC
- Laptop buying advice
- See all laptop reviews
- How does a long-forgotten machine fare in today's speed tests
- Getting WorldBench up and running
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