Using the Pentium II Today - Deep Dive
This video is a deep dive into the short lived Pentium II machines from 1998, how they came to be and what sort of processing power they had. Then an introduction to this specific PC, which is pretty much the top offering from the Pentium II world (a twin 450mhz setup with 1gb of PC100 ram) - aside from the special Xeon variants intended for the enterprise market. The graphics cards used a mostly an FX5200 (from 2003) and sometimes a GT610 (from 2012), both PCI bus versions.
This followed by a good look at what it can actually do today. A number of operating systems are tried including Haiku, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, ReactOS, Linux (several distro's), Windows XP and Windows 7 - with interesting results.
Lots of applications tried including web browsing (YouTube, Amazon, BBC, Nvidia etc), Microsoft Office, Open Office, Libre Office, content creation, video playback etc.
Lots of games tried too including Minecraft, Call of Duty, Lego Star Wars II, GTA San Andreas, Unreal Tournament, FarCry, Classicube and more.
Errata - At one point in the video I mention that 1GB is the maximum memory for a Pentium II. This is actually not true, the 1GB limit is a chipset limitation, not a processor limitation. Some late Pentium II motherboards and chipsets could actually handle more than 1GB.
