VERAULT
Veteran Member
Load Linux on it and it wont be as sluggish. Windows is crap.
- VCF South West - June 14 - 16, Davidson-Gundy Alumni Center at University of Texas at Dallas
- VCF West - Aug 2 - 3, Computer History Museum, Mountain View, CA
- VCF Midwest - Sept 7 - 8 2024, Schaumburg, IL
- VCF SoCal - Mid February 2025, Location TBD, Southern CA
- VCF East - April 2025, Infoage Museum, Wall NJ
-
Please review our updated Terms and Rules here
Should Pentium II/III Systems Have a Forum?
- Thread starter ajacocks
- Start date
hunterjwizzard
Veteran Member
- Joined
- Mar 21, 2020
- Messages
- 797
I like this. I feel like that's a better way to divie it up than chip.
Weird how that works, huh? They haven't added any significant new features to windows 10 since release, but somehow its gotten bigger and slower with each passing year.
Yep. I upgraded my daily laptop to Windows 10 as soon as I was able to after release. Said laptop was an HP Elitebook 8530p with a Core 2 Duo. Was slow but usable at the time, definitely wouldn't be with 22H2 installed now.
The key factor is an SSD though. Without that, Linux can't save you. I've tried, it's dog slow on said HP with the HDD. I'm sure it would run great still with solid state storage.
hunterjwizzard
Veteran Member
- Joined
- Mar 21, 2020
- Messages
- 797
But it ran great before.
That's the part that burns me so much. Instead of creating some kind of "switch" so that the OS could run fine on either spinning disk or SSD, they just evicerated that bit of code and optimized fully for SSD/NVMe.
Since you can't turn off whatever part of windows 10 makes spinning disks unusable, I'm having to convert a lot of my spare machines over to windows 7.
That's the part that burns me so much. Instead of creating some kind of "switch" so that the OS could run fine on either spinning disk or SSD, they just evicerated that bit of code and optimized fully for SSD/NVMe.
Since you can't turn off whatever part of windows 10 makes spinning disks unusable, I'm having to convert a lot of my spare machines over to windows 7.
VERAULT
Veteran Member
Oh thats a really good laptop. That was my work laptop years ago. I had a dual boot Linux/win 7 at the time. A rock solid machine. Kinda miss it. I think I even had a 120GB ssd in it to.
With that said I couldnt imagine doing something as horrible as loading windows 10 onto it. Show the poor laptop some mercy.
Chuck(G)
25k Member
Agent Orange
Veteran Member
My two cents, and worth maybe a little less, too much has been said about this already. Put the Pentiums in the same pot, exclude the P4's and lets move on.
I have Windows 7 on it now. Mine's beat up bad now though, it badly needs a parts donor. I loved that thing.
VERAULT
Veteran Member
I remember when those were current. The IT guys would throw away these things all the time if they didnt feel like warranty repairing them. Id find a coffee spill unit with a good LCD and a good unit with a smashed LCD and combine them into a working laptop. I had 3 of those Power house HP laptops that way although I think the 8530P was the newest model of the ones I rebuilt.
Definitely beasts.
Used this guy up until 2017, so yeah, a while. I got it used in 2014. It does still boot, but I could probably write down a dozen things that are wrong with it, mostly cosmetic and physical damage related. The keyboard has degraded in storage though, keys are taking force to get to work. Didn’t have that issue when I upgraded.
Used this guy up until 2017, so yeah, a while. I got it used in 2014. It does still boot, but I could probably write down a dozen things that are wrong with it, mostly cosmetic and physical damage related. The keyboard has degraded in storage though, keys are taking force to get to work. Didn’t have that issue when I upgraded.
VERAULT
Veteran Member
you can probably get a keyboard or palmrest to swap on it. Screen looks great, and the battery can be old if you dont need portability.
Sad to think mine was definitely eWasted by now.. Unless someone crafty got it for themselves on the way out. Hope so as I hate waste. Except for P4's... put them in a hole in the ground and fill it in with concrete. Total trash.
Pentium D's on the other hand.. I really like those things even though they use alot of wattage.
Sad to think mine was definitely eWasted by now.. Unless someone crafty got it for themselves on the way out. Hope so as I hate waste. Except for P4's... put them in a hole in the ground and fill it in with concrete. Total trash.
Pentium D's on the other hand.. I really like those things even though they use alot of wattage.
Battery is 100% fully cooked, died probably back in 2015 or 2016.
Issues:
- Dead battery
- Failing keyboard
- Missing key
- The touch button bar would intermittently lose power back when I used it and stop working
- One of the RAM slots is fussy. Thought it was dead for a while but it seems not to be? Maybe these handle it weird. It POSTs with RAM only in the fussy slot, but will not detect RAM in said slot if the other slot is populated. Ugh.
- Rubber touchpad buttons are degraded and worn, not sticky yet though
- LCD bezel is full of cracks
- Heavily scuffed up
- Missing case chunk in the back, was missing when I got it IIRC.
- Display doesn't latch shut
- Original TrackPoint cap went missing, replaced with one of the wrong type so it doesn't fit right.
I've basically decided I need a parts unit, or more likely that I'll make this one the parts unit and maybe move the guts over to a new shell to keep it original, even if the other unit I eventually get has a good motherboard.
I agree though, screen still looks great. Some parts and an SSD could make this one real nice again. It's just one of the many projects on my list. Still the favorite of my daily driver laptops over the years.
Issues:
- Dead battery
- Failing keyboard
- Missing key
- The touch button bar would intermittently lose power back when I used it and stop working
- One of the RAM slots is fussy. Thought it was dead for a while but it seems not to be? Maybe these handle it weird. It POSTs with RAM only in the fussy slot, but will not detect RAM in said slot if the other slot is populated. Ugh.
- Rubber touchpad buttons are degraded and worn, not sticky yet though
- LCD bezel is full of cracks
- Heavily scuffed up
- Missing case chunk in the back, was missing when I got it IIRC.
- Display doesn't latch shut
- Original TrackPoint cap went missing, replaced with one of the wrong type so it doesn't fit right.
I've basically decided I need a parts unit, or more likely that I'll make this one the parts unit and maybe move the guts over to a new shell to keep it original, even if the other unit I eventually get has a good motherboard.
I agree though, screen still looks great. Some parts and an SSD could make this one real nice again. It's just one of the many projects on my list. Still the favorite of my daily driver laptops over the years.
hunterjwizzard
Veteran Member
- Joined
- Mar 21, 2020
- Messages
- 797
I heard they sometimes made prisoners use Windows 8, at the fed level, but it was ruled unconstitutional. Something about "cruel and unusual punishment".
Really, Microsoft is shockingly consistent with every other windows version being crap.
VERAULT
Veteran Member
So like I said a replacement keyboard and touchpad will repair 4 of those things. Batteries again arent necessary unless you need it to be portable. Im typing this on a laptop plugged into the ac adapter,, so what.. Dont need to be mobile, get my drift?
Not staying clasped when closed is either broken hinges or the tab broke off.
Trackpoint caps can easily be found online. I would just ask online for someone to mail you one (i had a baggie of them but who knows where it even is now)
SSD is dirt cheap
As far as the bad ram slot, ram for that machine is super cheap. get one really large capacity ram module in the good slot and leave the other empty.
Not staying clasped when closed is either broken hinges or the tab broke off.
Trackpoint caps can easily be found online. I would just ask online for someone to mail you one (i had a baggie of them but who knows where it even is now)
SSD is dirt cheap
As far as the bad ram slot, ram for that machine is super cheap. get one really large capacity ram module in the good slot and leave the other empty.
Unfortunately not. 4GB single DDR2 modules are insanely expensive (like $40 a module).
I'm not honestly going to be putting a ton of money into this thing - at best I'd get it fully functional again, for the same price of getting another one that would be in better cosmetic condition. So I might as well do that. I did the same thing with a Latitude E6420 recently.
As for the battery, I don't need one, but it would be nice to get one of the cheap generic ones just so that I can run it on batteries if need be. Just my own preference.
VERAULT
Veteran Member
Really? Shoot I have boxes of them. (maybe its time to list them!)
PM ME with your info and ill send you some for the cost of shipping
PM ME with your info and ill send you some for the cost of shipping
Single 4GB DDR2 modules? Really? I’ll PM.
TH2002
Experienced Member
If there's one thing I hate almost as much as social media, it's streaming services... I refuse to give my money to any of them. Only exception is Spotify since I'm on my brother's duo plan - at least I'm not the one paying for it, whatever. Many after-school hours of mine used to be spent browsing YT, but these days most of my after-work hours are spent being a forum lurker and practicing my hobbies (doing research, radar-watching, working on my computers, listening to music, all that jargon). In other words, most of my visits to YT now are for educational and other serious purposes rather than entertainment, because that's all I can tolerate it for.
In my experience Windows 10 absolutely thrashes mechanical drives. My primary desktop has an SSD now and W10 becomes marginally tolerable when installed on one. My older brother has Windows 11 on his desktop and I absolutely hate it - Microsoft always manages to find clever ways to somehow make Windows worse than it already is. I have no plans of sticking around in the Microsoft ecosystem once hardware and software vendors begin dropping support for Windows 10 (though by that point, hopefully it'll be at least a few years past EOL).
That's exactly why YT doesn't give a flying [bleep] about its user base - they know most people have nowhere else to go. Someone pointed out on another forum that his favorite creators who have tried to abandon YT are failing because there's not enough potential viewership anywhere else.
Video hosting is expensive, but I don't think it would be quite as much of an issue for vertical networks - since, like I said, those are much smaller than a site like YT and cater to a specific, niche audience. Say if VCFED decided to set up its own "Vintage Computer-tube" or whatever - I would see it more as an extension of the forums than anything else.
Windows 7 was the last OS tolerable on a mechanical HD. I find if you have an SSD, you can install the OS on and have room for updates you can get by fine with your apps and games on a mechanical HD (something that does 180MB/sec or more). I used to do the same thing on older servers where I made sure DATA and OS drives were separate, so they didn't fight over the same drive.
Caluser2000
Banned
Linux loads faster on a spinning disk drive than MS NT based Windows does. I remove ssds on systems with them for use on other systems....