what speed do you need?

[VeNT]

I'm sitting here on a laptop I've just revived from the throws of hard drive death (love my bits box, never know what you'll find), its got windows XP, firefox, wimamp, VLC, DVD drive, normal bells etc yet its only a P3 1ghz (just) with 256 meg PC133 ram!
it works perfectly fine, does whats it supposed to and doesn't seem sluggish.
its even got built in wireless, although I'm not using that ( cables for the win ).

its brought me to think, what is the minimum spec you could live with?
I'm not talking about gaming as thats just a huge mantrap for computer specs, sky limit etc, I'm talking about what you could get by on, whats the requirements for you to do day to day work?
personaly, I think I could get on with this (as long as I didn't stuff it up with loads of crap), maybe a nicer sound card.

Vents minimum
P3 1000
256 PC133
60gig HDD (music)
15'' screen
onboard graphics/sound

what would you live with?

 

[Jez]

I'd always need a huge amount of storage space, but that can be tacked onto a computer of virtually any specification so i will ignore it.

I think i would be quite happy on roughly what you have posted, although i have gotten very used to a multiple monitor system so would find that hard to be without, and i'd likely want a touch more memory as from exeprience a 256mb system running winXP with lots of applications soon grinds to a halt.

 

[Xez]

I still sometimes use my very old laptop which is:

Celeron 800mhz
128MB not sure what speed or type
10GB HDD
Onboard sound and graphics
15" screen
Wireless card

Has Windows 2000 on it as XP is quite sluggish. I dont really game now much so all my needs are a little music and looking at news and reviews
The hardest thing to adjust to is the screen size and resolution

 

[Tetras]

P3 1000
256 PC133
60gig HDD (music)
15'' screen
onboard graphics/sound

Think I could survive with any P3 class CPU but would need 512MB of RAM (I can't help but open many apps/things at once), 40 GB HD and at least 17" screen (I find 15 too "pokey").

 

[BillytheImpaler]

Running Ubuntu on my home machine I find that a 500 MHz P3 CPU with 256 MiB RAM is sufficient for most all of my needs...

except FAH, that is.

Beyond that I don't need much HDD space; 10 GiB would do.
A 15" monitor is all I had for years and it'd continue to do OK.
Onboard graphics is OK too as long as it can handle OpenGL.

 

[VeNT]

I've been thinking about this more,
the VIA systems (Mini/micro/nano ITX) that are around 1-1.2 Ghz, how fast are they realy? like P3 speeds? or smellyron?

 

[BillytheImpaler]

I've been thinking about this more,
the VIA systems (Mini/micro/nano ITX) that are around 1-1.2 Ghz, how fast are they realy? like P3 speeds? or smellyron?

It'd depend on how you were using it. For web/email/etc it'd be dandy but VIA's floating point performance is orders of magnitude slower than a similarly clocked P3.

Media encoding would take ages.

 

[Raikiri]

Something along the lines of a P3 1200mhz/Athlon 1300, geforce 3, lots of HD space and 512mb ram. Can never have enough ram

Thats if I didn't play about with photoshop or play games, what I have now is the min for that tbh

 

[VeNT]

It'd depend on how you were using it. For web/email/etc it'd be dandy but VIA's floating point performance is orders of magnitude slower than a similarly clocked P3.

Media encoding would take ages.

when did you last bother using a P3 for media encoding?

 

[paradigm]

Dunno, I have to use a P4 2.8, 512MB RAM 60GB HDD for work (mainly only menial tasks, nothing taxing), and it grinds to a halt if I try to do too much at once (still not a lot at once mind).

I'd say I couldn't personally live without 768MB - 1GB of RAM. CPU would be fine, and although i'm low on HDD space, I'd say 80GB would do me if I was careful.

 

[BillytheImpaler]

when did you last bother using a P3 for media encoding?

About an hour ago I used LAME on Audacity to compress the recording of a meeting held this afternoon. It was done on a P3 733 MHz. It took about 4 minutes to crunch down an hour of audio.

 

[ghgh]

I use my P4 1800 mhz laptop for day to day things like browsing the forums, updating my website etc but its got 768meg of ram which makes life a bit better.

The minumum i could live with for day to day things is probably a p3 450 tbh, as I used to use it for browsing the net for years when I was downstairs.

 

[CarlD]

While if i aint gaming , im on msn and just browing the internet

I was at my aunties using her old

Intel celeron 800mhz
64mb ram
onboard gfx / sound
packard bell

15" crt

Worked fine/fast enough

 

[Avalon]

Before I gave it away last month I had:

Celeron 300A @ 504 with a FOP32 (still got my first 300A from OCUk back in the day when MadRad was killing Geforce One's by using TNT clocking tools on 'em and shouting as he answered the phone!)
Abit BH6
256MB PC133 CL2
Global Win 802
Creative Labs 32MB TNT2 Ultra
Voodoo 2

All this still run's Win2k nicely enough, even manages to run UltraHLE rather nicely. For office 97 and general internet use/download usage it's fine.