To the author of the article "Experiment: What can be squeezed out of a Pentium 166 megahertz?"

I began to write a comment in the new post from the “Antiques” section , and for some reason it was sold ...

In general, the source material like. I also had a very similar comp a couple of years ago, then I threw it away, as I was tired of messing around. There was exactly the same VIA mom, the same Pentium MMX 166, but 32 MB of memory, a S3 Trio64 VX / DX and an Opti931 sound. Comp was also somewhere in '97, and got me from a friend. What are my comments and personal experience? But:
- The dust in the system unit is still typed. The case of the midi-tower under AT is nothing more ergonomic than modern towers, and the build quality is the same. The amount of dust depends on environmental conditions, if it was clean, then there is no dust.
- I managed to increase the RAM to 128 MB, putting 4 SIMM slats of 32 meters each.
- I did not have a USB controller for PCI, but there was a card reader, and there was a USB 1.1 connector on the motherboard. I picked up the pinout, I connected it - it worked.
- the hard drive was originally WD at 2 gig, I put the other at 20 Gig. In order for the BIOS to see it, I made the first partition on 2 GB under FAT16 on another machine. Otherwise, for some reason, the screw was not detected at all.
- CD-ROM was 24-speed and perfectly read both CD-R and RW. I do not know why the author did not read them ...
- about the software. The highest performance on such a machine was achieved under MS Windows 95. I even have a license for it, by the way :). The problem was only in USB, which was officially supported under Win 95 OSR 2.1, but there really was no firewood for specific devices. And yes, do not forget that most of the drivers for the 95th were compatible with OS / 2 and in some cases were written by IBM itself. In short, USB was not yet thought of.
I tried to put on a machine a variety of Linux. It really turned out to put PuppyRus and the old Fedora Core 3. Why did the author put even more ancient OS and ancient Netscape - I do not understand. Opera 9 started up right away, the Russian fonts looked great. Flash did not work, because the CPU is too weak (by the way, I overclocked it to 188 MHz).

Here it is, handsome:

')
My maximum goal consisted of 2 points: Internet access via Bluetooth + GPRS and watching movies. As it should be compressed MPEG4 on the whole screen was in the "slide show", so I had to be content with the usual MPEG2. On a 14-inch monitor, the quality suited.
The first goal was formally achieved, but actually using the Internet was almost impossible. The Bluetooth and USB subsystems loaded the CPU so that the browser was running barely. Inet also dripped wildly slowly (on GPRS it is already not fast). In short, Internet surfing had to be abandoned. But with all the films burned out. I even subsequently was able to abandon the full-fledged Linux and switch to a portable distribution MOVIX. It is done this way: the system boots from a bootable CD with Movix, on which there is a small Linux and Mplayer with all the codecs. The OS is loaded into RAM, the CD is removed and a CD with a movie (650-700 MB) is loaded into the computer, which needs to be recoded in MPEG 2 on a “big” machine in advance and taken with you. The films were excellent, without lags and with full control of the situation from the keyboard. The only drawback is that the CD-ROM roared like a vacuum cleaner (yes, I know about hdparm -E, but then the film slowed down), which ultimately led me to frustration. Still, a person spoiled by modern speed is somehow not comfortable picking such old cars. Now I have Peintium 4 with ubuntu in that place - but that's another story.

PS I noticed that the author of the source topic has elegantly laundered the system officer and the keyboard with the mouse. For accuracy - respect!