What's the bare minimum you would say that can handle today's standards?

[50]

Hey, I'm posting off my dad's POS Compaq 500mhz PC. I cannot stand this thing and I don't understand how he can use it as well. What do you think would meet your bare minimums?

 

[Ionizer86]

Something around an Athlon 1.0Ghz Tbird.

While you're at it on the 500MHz, you may want to optimize the msconfig and do some other tune-ups.

 

[GoSharks]

i have been at 1ghz for the past three years now and i still have not felt any need to upgrade.

i do have a r8500 for the games and dual cpus with scsi 10k drives so this thing [was very] high end.

 

[Tetsuo]

Nothing less than a Barton 2500+

 

[MDE]

Any Athlon\Duron\PIII\Celeron above 1 GHz or so, or a 1.6GHz+ P4 with 256MB of RAM or more, and non-integrated video should be fine for web surfing, Word, email, etc.

 

[magomago]

for bare minimum? Web surfing, word processing, etc? No games?

If so than my k6-2 550 on the mvp3 chipset and a geforce2gts-v was just fine and kicked bootay (tho it had 320 megs of ram ) [though the funny thing is i can barely maintina 19fps on CS)

but i do a lot of multitaskingso my 2200+ is fine (and when I'm doing many things or it becomes winter as it will soon I stick up my tbredb to around 2.2Ghz and I'm happy )

 

[jar5tyle]

The minimum for my needs was probably my old computer

1700+ pali
GF4 Ti 4200
256 megs of PC2100

Even the video card was plenty

Ran every game I play fine

Anything other than gaming and video work.... pshhh a 1 gig machine, with 256 ram, if even that

 

[Twista]

1.3ghz duron
shuttle ak32l (kt266?) i think
ddr2100 256mb than up to 512 than up to 768
geforce 3
thats all

 

[Twista]

HOW THE FVCK DID MY POST GET BEFORE HIS AND HIS WAS HERE BEFORE MINE..

 

[Twista]

test

 

[Twista]

its not even 1:41 am ;p lol wtf and before i posted i saw his post alreadyy. im scared.
the yellow sky
now this.

dumb time changing

 

[Black88GTA]

Right now...I'm on an AT P166 machine. Integrated sound, integrated video (1MB vram ) No MMX. Maxed out at 128MB RAM. It's my backup box, my good one is currently out of commission until I get all the parts together to fix it. This one surfs the web and word processes, etc. great, but chokes on videos. Games made after 1997? Fugettaboutit. I hate this thing.

Bare minimums are relative to what you use it for. If all you do is word processing and surfing the web, a P100 will suffice. If you play the latest 3d FPS games at insane frame rates at huge resolutions, you need at least a 2.0GHz machine, lots of DDR, and a high end vid card.

 

[lobadobadingdong]

an 8088 with a 10MB hard drive 1.2MB floppy, with dos 3.3 and cga graphics.
as long as it has frogger,pong,space invaders,organ trail, and some kind of text editor I can use it for something

 

[vegetation]

Processing power doesn't really affect me as much as having enough physical memory. I'll take my old celeron 550 with 640 megs of ram over a P4-2.4 with only 128mb under win xp.

 

[spanner]

900mhz or better. Also 256mb ram. Most importantly in my mindis a system free of junk software running in the background (most people who complain to me about speed have a bunch of worthless software running in the background)

 

[Bovinicus]

I like a nice 1GHz as the bare minimum. I recommend 512MB of memory, but 256MB will do the job without too much performance degradation. Memory demands have historically increased pretty quickly. They will most likely continue to do so.

 

[ShawnD1]

My 350mhz P2 is fantastic with word processing, web browsing, print server, spreadsheets and other stuff like that. A computer from 5 years ago is just fine for non gaming as long as you have enough ram and a fast hard drive. My P2 has a 120GB 7200RPM drive and it runs fast. Programs open up immediately. I have an Emachines Celeron 500 as well and it is SLOW because the hard drive restricts everything. Try to open up Windows Explorer and the computer has to think about it for a good 30 seconds and I can hear the hard drive going nuts.

If you plan on gaming, prebuilt computers are not fast enough by a long shot; the computer MUST be built by you or a store that builds custom computers. The video card has to be at least a GF4 Ti (for a Nvidia fan) or Radeon 9500 (for an ATI fan) (I am not in any way implying that both are the same speed).

 

[McCarthy]

Without gaming - Pentium 200. Make it a Celeron 300a maybe, that would actually be comfortable. For web browsing, email, word processing, etc...yeah, more than enough. For listening to mp3s just fine, for watching video..that's why I'd say the 300 instead of the P1.

It depends what you're doing.

 

[arcenite]

like everyone else said... it really depends on what you're doing... to me, I will never have a fast enough rig to meet my bare minimum ^^

BIll

 

[mbackof]

PII with 128MB RAM is the bare minimum to word process, e-mail, and surf under Windows 2000. Under XP I would up that to a PIII500 with 256MB RAM.
For modern games, my Athlon 900 TBird with a 128MB GeForce Ti4200 and 384MB RAM under Win 2000 is plenty fast to run things. But within the year it will probably not be enough to run modern games.

The bottom line is, if he only want to e-mail, surf the WWW, and word process, reload the OS on his current machine and give it the virtual enema. If it is for games, go with a Athlon XP Barton 2500+ and a decent motherboard, 512MB RAM and upgrade him.

 

[dxkj]

I use a 750mhz Duron with 128MB Ram in Windows XP, and I have no problem. 40GB HDD, does my web serving easy.


Games... thats another matter



It also does video, etc fine

 

[jhu]

nothing less than a 32 processor power4+ with at least 512gb of ram and 18.7tb of disk space.

after seeing this thing in the works, i knew i couldn't go back to my quad processor itanium piece of crap

 

[modedepe]

Completely depends on what you're doing. If all you do is internet, word processing, etc, just about anything will get you by. I have a p2 400mhz with 128mb ram and a celeron 500mhz with 192mb of ram that i use for those types of apps all the time, and they are plenty fast (though it might take them a second longer to open ie than on a 3ghz p4). If you're gaming or video encoding though, those obviously aren't going to cut it.

 

[MrMaster]

Ipaq Celeron 500 mhz running windows 98. I have had this computer at work for over 3 years now.

Don't want to beg for a new computer right now because we haven't migrated over to windows XP yet nor do I like the new Compaq Evos that we get.

 

[tkdkid]

P3 at 500 or 600 MHz with at least 256MB of RAM. That would make a really nice machine for email, web browsing, and most games with the settings turned down. Nobody currently needs more than that for anything except gaming or video editing.

The OS makes a big difference of course. Even a high end machine running windows 98 would be a real pain to work with, so windows 2000 is also a minimum.