Absolutely! I remember that in 2005 working in Russian bank I had 1GB Pentium 4 PC. And back then it seemed to be crazy RAM amount. Even though I worked with heavy Excel tables.
@@mad_mario_ Definitely more. Most people did not have 2GB of RAM when Vista came out in 2006, and that OS sucked up ~1GB of RAM, leaving you with only 1GB of RAM left for applications. It was a disaster, especially when manufacturers were still selling laptops with 1 to 1 1/2 GB of RAM. Those machines quickly turned into stuttering messes.
I think our Schoolcare? Branded machines had 512Mb of RAM at most and that would have been around the same time. Given we were still rocking 300Mhz PII machines running 98se for doing the registers and only one computer room had XP machines anything was an upgrade!
I have a pentium 4 system that's capable of 4GB of ram as it's designed more as desktop server than consumer or school PC. Also, these school PC's by RM are actually built better compared to few consumer grade multi-media PC's that came out during the Vista & 7 days.
Most DDR1 boards were able to take 2GB to 4GB and DDR2 boards 4GB to 8GB depending on how many slots they had. But of course normally you would have paired the P4 3.0GHz with 512MB or 1GB RAM.
Just like mobile and smart phones. Progress was rapid in the 2000s and then the 'OS wars' of early 10s, now it's very incremental with barely any exciting innovation left.
I like that this '04 PC is running a legit copy of win 10/11, yet people out here with multi thousand dollar PCs have the reminder to register their copy permanently emblazened in the lower right corner of their screen. 😂
if we are talking about youtubers, usually the PC's are temporary builds, best not to lock the windows key to a system thats gonna get changed 30 times over with new video card, motherboard, cpu, ram, or ssd on a constant basis
The Pentium 4, especially the later 64-bit ones, are like a magic number for newer software. It's the oldest you can go and still be able to run most programs and OSes from today.
They're also the newest you can go for some old software - I've a Pentium D machine, so a tiny bit newer, running BeOS that can also run Windows 10 (if I breach BeOS's RAM limit)
Honestly, if the web tech stack wasn't a bottomless pit of uncontrolled bloat, a 20+ years old computer would be perfectly usable to this day, on a slightly trimmed down OS. RU-vid's video stream would be perfectly watchable on it in 720p, if not full HD, in something like VLC, if the megabytes of Javascript and all sorts of fancy layering crap wouldn't grind it to a halt. This isn't just true for early 2000s PCs, but G4/G5 Macs, and the like. Almost all of the extra horsepower and hardware acceleration, and multiple cores in a modern system is just used up to deal with the web bloat. Almost anything that has native code (not you, Electron "apps"), works just fine. This kind of experience is pretty well known from the Raspberry Pis, as you also mention it... I'm very appalled by the modern software. The future we were promised was so much better...
Truth. Going to a typical forum, with its top, side, and bottom floating ad viewers will spin up the fans I hardly realized existed on my Mac Mini 2018, and make the back of my phone hot to the touch. Everything else, including 3D CAD and multichannel audio applications -- no problem at all.
Experienced the same issue with RPis😅. It's the same with my 20 year old laptop as well. Perfectly fast machine with only 512 megs of ram and a single core, slow internet browser. To get around that I actually link it up with a more powerful laptop and just browse the web over remote desktop. Can watch HD videos with sound, perfectly.. order pizza, etc etc etc. I'll say though: period-correct software from the old days makes all the difference in speed(at least - .on the old laptop)
OH MY, I never realized the "Tamiya" wrench fit PC parts. As a life long RC car and PC builder guy I cannot believe this never occured to me before! You learn something every day. Great video as always.
AGP cards will run in PCI fallback mode on newer versions of Windows following the removal of actual AGP support. Nvidia cards will still work with 3D acceleration, but crippled performance. ATI cards become nothing more than basic display adapters, which is what you're seeing here. Early versions of Windows 10 are the endgame for meaningful 3D performance on AGP cards, unfortunately. Of course, you're still going to be fairly limited even then by the fact that the HD 3850 is the most powerful AGP card out there anyway.
My high school had probably one of the earliest: RM 380Z: (blue & white case) 16K, cassette tape BASIC ... upgraded 1 year later [1978] to 380Z 48K dual 5.25 SS-SD floppies : 72K per disc :)
having an HDD that old and not imaging it first makes me a little sad; but this is such a cool project! I had no idea RUFUS actually allowed you to customize windows 11 installs to skip TPM requirement!!
Not sure why people worry about using "period correct" HDs. Just use an SSD and save a few hours of your life. Bonus you can see how usable a PC when it's not tied down to a HD.
Agreed. But even with an SSD, systems that old are not really usable running Windows 10 or 11. I know, I've tried it and it still was painfully slow and effectively unusable.
You already know how it would run on an ssd, why not check how painful slow it would be on an hdd? Its not as if he's going to daily drive the thing, so make it slower just for giggles.
If this PC supports SATA, it'll probably be SATA I, which is not that much faster than a HDD. And also, even with SATA III, the CPU would still not perform enough to use all of it's theoretical speeds.
If you did want to try going ham with as many upgrades as possible for this it's worth mentioning that PCI is technically forwards compatible with PCI Express if you use an adapter with a bridge chip. The bridge chips were designed for using PCI cards on PCI Express but the chips are bidirectional so reverse adapters do exist. You could put a modern GPU in it.
Brilliant. I have upgraded 3 older PCs to Windows 11 using this method and very easy it was too. Now just waiting for 24H2 to see how if they impose any restrictions
All Pentium 4 CPUs are based on the NetBurst microarchitecture. The Pentium 4 Willamette (180 nm) introduced SSE2, while the Prescott (90 nm) introduced SSE3 and later 64-bit technology. Later versions introduced Hyper-Threading Technology (HTT). The first Pentium 4-branded processor to implement 64-bit was the Prescott (90 nm) (February 2004), but this feature was not enabled. Intel subsequently began selling 64-bit Pentium 4s using the "E0" revision of the Prescotts, being sold on the OEM market as the Pentium 4, model F. The E0 revision also adds eXecute Disable (XD) (Intel's name for the NX bit) to Intel 64. Intel's official launch of Intel 64 (under the name EM64T at that time) in mainstream desktop processors was the N0 stepping Prescott-2M. Intel also marketed a version of their low-end Celeron processors based on the NetBurst microarchitecture (often referred to as Celeron 4), and a high-end derivative, Xeon, intended for multi-socket servers and workstations. In 2005, the Pentium 4 was complemented by the dual-core-brands Pentium D and Pentium Extreme Edition.
@@ctrlaltrees Also quite a bunch of PCI sound cards will work, like even the ones starting at price of £ 9 or a bit more, being based on CMI (C-Media) / HT 8738 chip (up to 4 audio channels, 24 bit 44.1 kHz), for example, newly-built or second-hand.
Huh, I thought I'd read somewhere that the current version of Windows 11 requires at least a core-i-whatever CPU, dropping support for the Core-2 -Duo for example; guess that was wrong! Congrats on getting this to work! An SSD would probably be a big help, especially with the swapping, as you said. On one of those old premium systems with 4GB of RAM it might not be bad.
@@jensputzlocher8345 Ah, yeah; I was thinking of the FIRST incompatibility 24h2 will include, the "PopCnt" instruction, which excludes core2duos. Now there's a new requirement they added for SSE 4.2; sounds like that was introduced with the i7. Found this on tomshardware; I'd link articles, but RU-vid always deletes my comments when I do that :( Be curious to see that happens with this PC when Windows Update tries to force that update on it later this year.
@@catriona_drummond Yes, thanks to Rufus you can modify Win 11 23H2 to boot on an Core2Duo from 2007, but Win 11 24H2 will require the SSE4.2 instruction set (?) - this will require a Intel 8th gen core CPU or equal.
@@jensputzlocher8345 No, on Intel's ark site you can do an advanced search that filters by instruction set, SSE4.2 is supported by 1st gen Core i series CPUs. AMD doesn't have a search like this, so it's a pain to search for SSE4.2 support.
I was in primary school in the mid-80s, and we had an RM Nimbus 186! There was no internal storage. Everything ran from floppy disk. There was also a BBC Micro. We used to play Repton on it! And yes, I played the original Doom when it released
Interesting video and kudos for all the effort you put on it. I have an intel quad Q9550 socket 775 running very well Windows 10 LTS (youtube 720p very smooth). So on 10 years older hardware. Back in the day, even on the first Pentiums, you could NOT run WindowsXP (the 10 years gap). Indeed, the progress was bigger, faster until year 2000. It is sad.
I have Windows 10 on a Q9650, SSD, 8 GB DDR3 RAM, it's actually surprisingly usable & decent for older light gaming. Everyday tasks are feel as fast as my 9700k
There is a windows vista driver for the radeon 9600 you can install that one by extracting the package and then installing the driver through device manager
no way man are you a fan of stepmom too? just saw them for the second time not too long ago! i was so confused when i saw them pop up in your youtube feed lol i thought it was my feed
I still use my 2010 two cores Toshiba notebook for watching RU-vid and online movies in my summer country house. But it runs not Win11 off course :) Linux mint actually. In 2020 changed HDD for SSD and added RAM up to 4GB. Works just perfectly and very responsive. Thanks 4 brilliant videos. Looking forward for new ones! Good luck!
I still daily a 2009 quad core HP, running Windows 11 off an SSD and with 8GB RAM. It basically runs like a brand new product, really fast and fully functional!
This is your first experience with windows 11? Hilarious. I also cant stop thinking about some nerd at microsoft parsing through the telemetry data and finding this outlier.
Quick tip: For RU-vid (or any video site for that matter) go into settings of the browser and turn off Hardware Acceleration. This will make a huge difference on the default Windows driver.
I know what you mean about the rate of progress. I remember the 90s when it was hard to go a whole year without having to upgrade something. But my current desktop PC is one I built in 2012 with a 3rd gen Core i7 CPU and it's still in daily use doing software development, CAD and office tasks under Windows 10 and it definitely doesn't feel old even though it is 12 years old. I gave it an SSD and better graphics card about 4 years ago but that's all that's been done to it.
Funnily enough I just became the owner of a machine with the same motherboard in it. Installing W11 wasn't the OS on it is something I have thought of. VIA boards are a good choice for Windows XP and also 98. It's fascinating just how far you can go into the past or the future. x86 hardware is the very definition of versatility. Someone could install an old OS plus W11 on different drives and have a dual use retro + modern experience on the same machine. The latter isn't great of course. But you have shown it works 👍
It's installing like that because the Ethernet drivers are generic from the windows 11 and well it won't give you 100% of full power. And CPU and chipset drivers are as well very very important because you lose a lot of power there to. Ssd connection actually my friend an external ssd or actually an m2 that can connect through usb with an adapter that is more faster than sata 1. But yes ssd with sata 1 will increase the speed not much for like me that has an normal hdd but yours 50gb definitely better performance. But looking at this ngl it's impressive thank you for doing this 😊 you made my day better. Some drivers are still on the internet try writing the motherboard name and try your luck. If not reddit and discord communities usually can help you find or give you some drivers. Ohh vga driver is as well very important thing. Windows 7-11 creates a generic we can say a bad copy of the original driver so that it makes the machine usable but far from perfect.
Thank you Rees, I really enjoyed this one - I have the 3.4Ghz variant of this as part of my collection that was running Windows 10 at one point (albeit in a later motherboard with 4 gigabytes of ram) and was suprised at how well it was doing! 😊
Yeah, had similar issue running windows 10 even with a 600 series pentium 4 with 64 bit support (670). processor not only needs 64bit support but also lahf/sahf support which was introduced with the cedar mill pentium 4 models. It was interesting seeing windows 10/11 running on 8gb ddr2 800mhz, a gtx 1070, and a pentium 4 651 overclocked to roughly 4.2ghz and a 128gb sata ssd, gonna be doing some more testing on it to see how various software runs on it.
U surely pushed the limits here further ! I made a Toshiba laptop with c2d t6600 4gb ddr2 ram 800mhz +ssd run win11 Intel gma gfx 256mb but this is x treme 🤩
The most important question though, did you apply the perfect amount of thermal paste. First the hand blocking the view and then the cooler doing the same, it felt deliberate :)
Our school was full of Core 2 era RM computers until about 2018, and they fully upgraded all of them to Windows 10 and then replaced them by 2022. Had a similar computer in the DT block to this, absolutely ancient, for years - the oldest one in the school. If this computer was made before September 2004, it's older than I am.
Damn. If this can run windows 11 THAT WELL, then I wonder how many such low end systems from like, 2007 and later can... Like this will likely save loads of e-waste getting dumped as we find a way to run such modern OSes on these!
I remember in 2016 i was in a basic IT class and one of our labs was installing windows 10 on multiple machines. Some newer than others. Most older and still running XP. Some of us finished in an hour. Others about 2-3
This reminds me of the Pentium 4 PC I got my hands on some years back that was an office PC at my aunt's job, that got shelved in 2005-2006 for being slow, with each new Windows it was brought out, updated to the latest, then thrown back in for being slower and slower. I put W10 on it, it was horrible, now it's used as a storage PC by a friend who removed that pile of rust from my house, he put some Linux on it(Lite, or Puppy, I don't know) and it runs 24/7 keeping up a few SSHDs and SSDs up with IDE-SATA adapters, it's cursed. Seeing how far the system requirements of Windows has come is really nice, it showcases why putting stricter limitations on hardware for Win11 isn't as bad as it was first cried out to be.
I used that exact monitor as one of my side monitors for the past 2 years. Overclocked it to almost 100hz, but idk how much of that I was getting over VGA, LOL. I just sold it with a budget build recently, to afford my ultrawide. You wouldn't think it was useful because of the size, but it was perfect for either watching a RU-vid video or to keep Spotify open etc. It also was where I relegated all of my desktop icons and folders too, lol. Kept my Desktop looking tidy.
My main desktop PC (I use my new Notebook most of the time though since 3 years) still is a Pentium Core2 Quad Q6600 (also LGA775) I bought in 2007. I've replaced the main HDD with an SSD few years ago, but besides this, it happily runs Windows 10 and works perfectly fine for me. I won't upgrade to Windows 11 though. I'm still stunned it works so good. It ran for hours every day from 2007 to 2020 and I used it a lot for video recodring/encoding, software development (web, embedded), running VMs (until VMware decided to require a CPU instruction it doesn't support).
I want to ask, I have a laptop that is actually compatible to update to Windows 11. But if I update it, is it better to update directly via Windows Update, or just reinstall Windows to update it to Windows 11? My specs: • AMD Athlon Silver 3050u 2.30GHz • 8GB RAM (Dual Channel) • Radeon Graphics/Integrated • 2GB VRAM • 512GB SSD
i wouldnt even be upset if you used a modern hardrive for thsi system it would be cool to just get it working haha. awesome video loved it. you gain a sub from me
I was running one of these running Debian with XFCE from ~2012 up to 2016 with zero issues. That only had a gig of RAM, but it did what I needed it to do.
I modified the cooler that is in your pc to fit any socket by filing out the holes, i took the plastic pins off, i filed it down, and it can now fit my socket 1700 :p and it keeps my i5 10400f at 35 degrees celcius, which is nuts :p and i love what you are doing, i try stuff like this as well.
Great idea, like this very much! Also, when put next to the very old IBM, I started to actually like the mix of beige PC and black 5.25" drive (even if a optical one in this case😂). Totally forgot that this was pretty much the norm back in the days, even on CBM stuff. Don't remember when I started feeling that was an odd look on PCs and had to have beige drives on beige PCs or black drive on black PCs. Hm. Well, just a note on the side 😅 Cheers!
Thanks Rees, and to Dave Velociraptor for pointing me here on a twitter post. Apart from just being fun, this video is also relevant to me as I have a hp laptop that's a 2017 model 7th gen i5, that's works brilliantly. And yet I get that tpm message when trying to update to Windows 11. The computer is great and I dont want to have to replace it, so good to see there are workarounds to this.
There are a few things you can do to improve your experience with Windows 11 on that old machine. One of them being is changing your visual appearance settings to "adjust for best performance", as well as looking into community made drivers that support Windows 10 and 11 for those AGP cards
@@ctrlaltrees Probably because Windows doesn't know anymore what AGP is. You can try either Windows 10 v1511 (which is long unsupported) or LTSB 2015 (based on the original v1507 release, still supported until 2025).
Great necromancy work, mate! So, I have an idea. Hear me out on this.... Low-Profile PCI raid card. Compact flash cards with adaptors. Raid 0. yes, a complete abomination, but it would be interesting to see how much snappier it would be.
re: the IBM 5150 vs. the P4: now hold up one of the new generation mini PC`s, and not only compare how much things have miniaturized but also show graphs featuring benchmarks and pricing. That`s kind of the mind-blowing thing. My first Wintel machine was a 286 with 2Mb memory, 9" monochrome VGA monitor and a 20Mb hard drive worth about $1500 in 1990 dollars. My current rig is a Lenovo Ryzen SFF machine with 16Gb and 2Tb SSD, hooked up to a 22" Viewsonic OLED display. The machine itself is about the size of a USB DVD-ROM and cost me about $300. That price:performance ratio is pretty amazing to me!
This is an world of busines, imagine if microsoft dind´t try to make difficult and didn´t upgrade the windows versions, all to make you spend money on new equipmentt???!!! But people start get tired of every season to by a new hardware. Thank´s to people like you there is always one way to go around this shit, me and for shure thousands around the world we are very grateful for this videos. Thanks a lot.
Honestly the pentium 4, as gimped of a processor as it was, does have its perks, it pioneered the early XP days before it got replaced by the core 2 line. It really does have its unique place in computing history!
Microsoft did like their "claiming a thing is needed before we actually start using it" cycles... I remember copying Windows XP DLLs to my WIndows 2000 system so games would run, got a good 6 months or so extra out of it before they finally started needing features that only existed in the XP kernel. 8GB hard drive in 2004 is getting on for those cameras which still came with 32MB Compact Flash cards in the package at a point where anything less than 512MB was "you're paying more for the plastic enclosure than the chips in it"!
You may improve performance of the older Intel processors by turning off "enhanced halt state" - also known as "C1E". You can do this in the BIOS settings (if the setting is available), then save and exit the BIOS. It's just a power saving feature.
I swear, these school PC's are built better compared to office PC's & consumer grade multi-media PC's that came out during the Vista & 7 days and the case has decent arflow too!.
With Rufus I plug the drive from the machine I want to install on into one of those USB adapters. I then tell Rufus I want to make a "Windows to go" version and tell it to write to the USB drive. After it gets done I remove the drive from the USB adapter and install it back in the machine. It bypasses the "boot from USB, install, reboot, and finish install" steps and goes straight to "...and finish the install". You can take advantage of Rufus doing the install part on a faster machine and save time.
Beleive it or not i had thay exact monitor with my first home built machine. I was 12-13. It was 2013 and i had an a6 6400k- 8gb radeon ram- stock cooler- a reman hd7770 from newegg- and a wd blue 500gb with a copy of windows 7 installed via not so legitimate ways. But after all that my allowance only gave me the opportunity for the 15$us monitor from goodwill. I play so much minecraft and planetside 2 on that monitor. And I would put a paycheck on the fact my performance issues 100% spawned in the fact that monitor was so akward with a low refresh. It brought back a ton of good memories seeing that monitor again
Back in my day (late 80s), we used RM PC186s at school. Some former pupil had burned down the school hall and when they rebuilt, we got a shiny new networked computer lab where I ended up spending 100% of my time rather than going to lessons. 😂 I want to say though, the most interesting thing about these RM machines is probably the software, so I think you should revert yours back to stock after your experiments! BTW, almost everyone uses the web versions of MS Office now rather than the stand alone apps as it makes collaboration a bit easier.
Interesting to see this old hardware running Zthe latest windows. It would be quite interesting to see a version of Linux running on it. Something like XUbuntu or Kinux mint would be a decent fit, and might even have working sound and graphics drivers
I was going to mention the same thing about id like to see what it was like running Linux. I have a no name beige box PC which has lower specs than the RM (2.8ghz Pentium D, 1GB RAM 40GB IDE HDD and integrated graphics and that runs AntiX linux at a usable speed. Also if you try installing the H264ify extension for the browser then the RU-vid experience might be a bit better as by default YT likes to use VP9 codec for videos so the extension forced H264 codec.
im using tiny10 on my old sony viao 2008 which originaly came with vista.... over the years i had xp and win 7 running on it. then 2014 i bought a new laptop and kind of forgot about the sony viao. this year there is lots of videos on youtube about reviving old pc. Since its a 32bit unit 2gb ram and 2 partitions of 128g.. i had only 1 windoows option and that was tiny10 or a dozen linux distros. So i installed tiny10 and was blown away that its actually works ad pretty fast browser with edge working really well...i even install bodhi linux OS on the second partition, i installed a VM and Rrun Bunsenlabs OS. All works perfectly wirhout reeplacing any hardware...i havent touch my 2022 windows 11 hp laptop...for a while. Those linux distros are insane
I would like to see a follow-up video showing what difference an SSD and compatible graphics card does make. My guess is that it would turn out to be a "usable" lab machine for light browsing and watching stuff on RU-vid.
Well, I might just set up an old Pentium 4 I have laying around... my family could use a gaming PC! For running Sega Saturn, Genesis, and NES games... probably on Debian or Mint. It's nice to know that my plan B should in theory work.
yeah we had RM Nimbus computers at my school but that was 1994-1996, i remember playing Simcity on one of the computers back in the day during lunch times, as at one point the computer room was also our form room.
I can’t wait to try this on my 12 year old system that still pretty much plays most of the latest games (with a 6 year 8GB GPU) and is running 10 but can’t officially support 11. I’ll get a few more years out of this old system yet!
I love how you basically have to shove windows down the throat of an old PC to get it to work, but you could throw almost any Linux distro on it no sweat
I have brand new 16 core AMD motherboards and I tried installing Windows 10 and 11 and the computer just freezes or turns off. I was told there is a power management setting in the BIOS that causes problems for Windows 10 and 11. I don't know what setting it is, c-State I think is what they said I can't find the setting I put Windows 7 on and it runs great
I feel like LTSC would be a better improvement than actually debloating stock Windows. At least I've found more success with it. Also disabling Windows Defender's Real Time Protection improves system responsivenesss heavily!
My advice with those stock cooler 775 is to take it out of chasis and then plug the cooler so you see if the white lid made contact then you can press the black ones without breaking it. In the case of broking there are replacements but also you can use parts from broken zip tires the plastic is the same and same wide.
Good grief those and the original Stone SFF Celeron things were my muse in Primary school, i collect school laptops from yesteryear, among the likes of Novatech, RM, Stone and Viglen.
