12-08-2012, 09:35 AM
Hi Joe,
Yes, the press coverage has been perhaps misleading, but we all know that journos are prone to over-simplification - especially where tech is concerned. To be fair, the BBC's coverage - well, the bits I've seen - has been pretty good. But having played with one, I must admit that it's more "real" and usable than I expected, although a 10 year old P4 running XP will obviously be of more use to most people wanting a straightforward desktop machine.
A P2 is the second-generation Pentium, which came out in 1997. They were in the "Slot 1" package, which seemed very exciting at the time. Clock speeds varied from 233MHz to 450MHz, which seemed unbelievable back then. I remember stepping from a 200MHz P1 to a 333MHz P2, and the difference was staggering - of course, everything else in the system was correspondingly faster; it's not just the CPU speed. I still have that 333MHz machine - it's on my desk at work, and it gets regularly used, believe it or not. It runs Win98, and runs it well.
The Pentium III went to just over 1GHz, and I have a few of those around as well. The P4 reached nearly 4GHz, but 3.2GHz is fast as I have - and that consumes nearly 100W when it's working hard... The faster P4s are still a reasonably viable machine for everyday use today for most people, but they are very power-hungry (and therefore often noisy) compared to more modern multi-core processors. The advantage of most P4 motherboards is that you can normally use up to 2GB of RAM, which is key to running XP well. Most P3 motherboards I've seen are limited to 1GB, and the DIMMs needed for these tend to be more expensive.
Grudgingly, Windows 7 is actually very good indeed. I didn't want to like it, especially after suffering Vista previously, but they've got things pretty right with 7 - in my experience, providing the hardware is supported, it "just works", though no-doubt the anti-M$ brigade wouldn't want to agree. I don't run it at home because XP is currently fine for what I need, but I use it at work, and am glad that I'm not stuck with XP - it is an old OS now that struggles to run the large and complex applications in our corporate environment. But it's horses for courses, of course. Win98 is fine on my old P2 machine mentioned above, but I only use that machine for very specific tasks that require the direct access to hardware that Win9x offers and NT doesn't.
Joe, I'm with you - last time I bought a new computer was in 2004, and that was in kit form. Apart from new hard drives, I don't spend money on new computer bits. This machine recently had a graphics card upgrade (£20 eBay - the card was >£200 new!) and it got a CPU upgrade from a junk machine with bulging electrolytics. My "server" machine, running Ubuntu, was landfill, but with an eBay CPU and RAM upgrade it's now pretty usable. I have boxes of computer hardware salvaged from skips - all from the P4 and before era - so if there's anything anyone wants, just ask...
Cheers,
Mark
Yes, the press coverage has been perhaps misleading, but we all know that journos are prone to over-simplification - especially where tech is concerned. To be fair, the BBC's coverage - well, the bits I've seen - has been pretty good. But having played with one, I must admit that it's more "real" and usable than I expected, although a 10 year old P4 running XP will obviously be of more use to most people wanting a straightforward desktop machine.
A P2 is the second-generation Pentium, which came out in 1997. They were in the "Slot 1" package, which seemed very exciting at the time. Clock speeds varied from 233MHz to 450MHz, which seemed unbelievable back then. I remember stepping from a 200MHz P1 to a 333MHz P2, and the difference was staggering - of course, everything else in the system was correspondingly faster; it's not just the CPU speed. I still have that 333MHz machine - it's on my desk at work, and it gets regularly used, believe it or not. It runs Win98, and runs it well.
The Pentium III went to just over 1GHz, and I have a few of those around as well. The P4 reached nearly 4GHz, but 3.2GHz is fast as I have - and that consumes nearly 100W when it's working hard... The faster P4s are still a reasonably viable machine for everyday use today for most people, but they are very power-hungry (and therefore often noisy) compared to more modern multi-core processors. The advantage of most P4 motherboards is that you can normally use up to 2GB of RAM, which is key to running XP well. Most P3 motherboards I've seen are limited to 1GB, and the DIMMs needed for these tend to be more expensive.
Grudgingly, Windows 7 is actually very good indeed. I didn't want to like it, especially after suffering Vista previously, but they've got things pretty right with 7 - in my experience, providing the hardware is supported, it "just works", though no-doubt the anti-M$ brigade wouldn't want to agree. I don't run it at home because XP is currently fine for what I need, but I use it at work, and am glad that I'm not stuck with XP - it is an old OS now that struggles to run the large and complex applications in our corporate environment. But it's horses for courses, of course. Win98 is fine on my old P2 machine mentioned above, but I only use that machine for very specific tasks that require the direct access to hardware that Win9x offers and NT doesn't.
Joe, I'm with you - last time I bought a new computer was in 2004, and that was in kit form. Apart from new hard drives, I don't spend money on new computer bits. This machine recently had a graphics card upgrade (£20 eBay - the card was >£200 new!) and it got a CPU upgrade from a junk machine with bulging electrolytics. My "server" machine, running Ubuntu, was landfill, but with an eBay CPU and RAM upgrade it's now pretty usable. I have boxes of computer hardware salvaged from skips - all from the P4 and before era - so if there's anything anyone wants, just ask...
Cheers,
Mark
