Can a Pentium 100MHz be used to stream MP3's?

[iamme]

I have an old P100 box, and I was wondering if it could handle streaming MP3's from my main PC. It'll probably run Win95 or 98. It only has a 1GB HD. I wanted to do this wirelessly (already have a WiFi network at home).

Can this machine handle it?

 

[erikiksaz]

I wouldn't count on a 100mhz cpu doing it. Maybe a 166mhz cpu.

 

[Lord Evermore]

Overclock it. 🙂 Even at 100MHz though, it might be able to do it if you make sure nothing else is running, and use an efficient MP3 player (i.e., not WinAmp3).

P166's are only like 10 bucks though if you can find them.

 

[ChefJoe]

I have a Pentium 150 laptop I use as an e-mail station. 48 megs of ram. It runs win98 and can play mp3s with winamp 2.7 provided you're not doing anything else on it. Be sure to disable the graphic eq. or else it'll get choppy.

 

[iamme]

I really didn't want to invest any money into it, besides buying a WiFi client. But, I'll see if there are any hot deals on a P166 CPU 🙂 I would only run WinAmp 2.x on it. I wanted to use it to stream MP3's in our basement, where there's exercise equipment.

I don't know if I can overclock it....it's a Dell machine 🙂

 

[Lord Evermore]

What kind of crappy sound are you going to be getting out of it though? I assume it doesn't have a good sound card in it, unless at some point you put something like an AWE64 in it.

For some reason, MP3's played better on my old 166+ using I think WinAmp in the version 1.x line than they do on my current machines, or most machines I've used in a few years. I don't remember any skipping or other issues back then. But on my 1.2GHz machine, and my roommate's 1GHz, and my ex-office's 500MHz machines, we get skips and pops every once in awhile when something intensive happens.

 

[Rooster286]

be sure to check www.oldversion.com for older winamps, which seem to run great on old machines. Gave my sister my old P120, and Winamp 2.0 (I believe) runs them fine.

 

[smp]

Install linux, no graphical stuff and play mp3's from the command line, it'll work fine. Windows has too much overhead. It's really not that complicated either. The mp3 box howto describes how to do it with a 486, so if it'll work on that....
I remember playing mp3s with winamp on a P120, recently, and it was a little fvcked up.

 

[vegetation]

You'll need to run Win95 or better yet linux. Win98 has too much overhead, you'll get choppy sound once in a while, especially if it's being networked.