Ppro vs. P classic

[sciencewhiz]

My second computer is a pentium classic 166 with 32 mb of ram. I have been offered a Pentium Pro 200 with 96 MB of ram. I've heard that the Ppros are really slow at 16 bit tasks, will the extra ram make enough of a difference to upgrade?

This computer is used for general web surfing and word processing and a little bit of programming, no games.

Thanks for any advice that you can give.

 

[Sunner]

They're quite slow when it comes to 16 bit stuff yes, but OTOH there are pretty much no 16 bit programs left out there, so unless you plan on running alot of nostalgica stuff on your comp, I cant see any reason not to upgrade, since the PPro should be quite an improvement in alot of tasks.
Besides, anything thats old enough to be 16 bit is probabaly old enough to run fine on pretty much anything over 100 MHz.

 

[jpprod]

Plus Ppro has fullspeed L2 cache and much more advanced FPU. I believe it's worthwhile to upgrade if it's cheap enough and you use the computer a lot.

 

[AndyHui]

Go for the PPro. 6th generation design really makes a difference and so does the full speed cache. The only problem with the PPro is that it lacks a segment register cache, so its handling of 16-bit code is quite weak. This is not really going to be a problem unless you are running Win 3.1x.

Most programs are 32-bit now.......Win95 still had a lot of 16-bit legacy code in it....Win98 and after have a lot less....WinNT/Win2K has none.

 

[sciencewhiz]

My Uncle just upgraded so he offered to give me the ppro, so I don't have to pay anything for it.

The computer is running windows 95. I can't think of any 16 bit applications that we run on this computer, but I know that it is possible for 32bit windows applications to have 16bit code in them.

Everyone is seeming to say to take the upgrade, are there any dissenters?

 

[Buddha Bart]

nope, upgrade. PPro's were the "xeon" of their day. They actually too the ppro and downgraded it a little to make it easier to manufacture, and called it the Pentium II.

bart

 

[Dennis Travis]

If I were you I would take the PPro! It will be faster with anything you will probably run on it. Put Win 98 on it though since with 96 megs RAM it will run just fine and it's a way better OS than 95 overall and more 32 Bit also. You are getting a great deal for free!!

 

[samgau]

One more hands up for the PPro, i'm using a PPro200 w/ 256K full speed cache and 64 mb ram running winNT 4.0 SP6 workstation... and the apps running on it do fine... the PPRo is the true predesessor to the Pentium II, for example the last mobo's running the PPro using a slot1 to socket8 adapter also ran the first PII's up to 300 Mhz i believe.