@@miekkbblocking is invoked on page load and then on events. It's not some constantly running code in the background. Yes it's extra code that runs but it blocks way more code of the ads from running
@@miekkb if you use ublock origin that'll pretty much never be a problem even the lower quality adblocking extensions will probably be less detrimental than the ads
That's actually how I got into Ad blocking in the first place. One time I noticed that on some web page, the loading was always slow. When I took a closer look, I found that it is only caused by loading ads. As then Ad blockers were already present (maybe one of the earlier versions of what later became Adblock Plus), I gave it a shot and was amazed how fast everything loaded suddenly. I have never ever browsed the web without ad blockers ever since.
The internet is full of bloat and unoptimized code. Even something that looks super simple like the Google homepage has gotten more complicated than it was say 20 years ago. I miss the days when the internet had quality content, not flashy and fancy looking websites that have about 4 times the amount of code than they actually need to have.
it's always been like this though. it's not that it's old, it's that they don't have enough cache. I had a celeron D with 256KB of cache in the 2000s and it was slow with any sort of web media would make my system instantly unusable. even when technology improved with 4-cores around 2010 systems still struggled because the CPUs were getting faster but the RAM wasn't developed quick enough to process web content and media.
The sad part is that programmers nowadays don't know about optimization or are discouraged against doing this process as the notion that reigns technology is "Unused resources are wasted resources". Basically translates as "You should make your/people's PC run at 100% at all times" I've met programmers that say things like "It's optimized! The more you have, the more it uses!" And try to do as many mental backflips to the point the discussion stops making sense. I would say this whole thing is to push newer and newer devices OR to de-place the computer market and favor the phone one instead. (Which is less expensive to upgrade every 2-4 years like it is common for people to do now). I would much prefer to keep my devices for 12 years.
@@carlosdasilva2409 I also live in this painful world. I come from a place where people made great things with 48k of ram. I get that it's time consuming to write everything in asm these days but the waste with javascript frameworks and the way people use them is just totally bonkers.
It’s less JavaScript that’s the problem than the constraints within which most web development takes place. Most page scripts are written using frameworks which focus on developer productivity rather than runtime performance. Most developers are working in companies where pushing out new features is prioritised over client-side performance tuning. And they’re usually working on hardware that’s only a couple of years old with current browser builds so runs JS without breaking a sweat. Add to that the advertising bloat, the tracker cookies, the use of graphics for ‘aesthetic’ rather than functional purposes, the pervasive use of SSL for content which doesn’t need encryption…
@@EleanorMcHugh racker cookies, are getting insain, the there 30+ on almost every webpage you visit, today, and there doing apserlutly nothing for the end user
@@EleanorMcHugh Absolutely, that is my experience too from the time when it was more widely introduced. I did try it, but for formal webpages, like the local communal instances i always used handwritten HTML in order to speed up the loading process, but also beacuse it was easier to maintain the site for people with limited knowledge of the basic of scripts. I made textblocks which where easy to change and also hidden instructions in the script so the person maintaining the site would see what everything did in the script according to my instructions and it could easily be done in notepad or any similar text editor and then just copy and paste if they needed to change anything. Also i made the text format and the choose of letters, contrast colours, etc pretty much as the instructions for army printings, in a way even elder people could easily see and read the pages and see where they was internaly linked, etc. And also with letters most people had as default on a regular home computer. As booring as they where, There was no complains about those... ha ha
I like to install a custom operating system like lineage os or kai os Also install differt laucher like the evie launcher and simple keyboard Remove moving animation in developer moder
Yeah, I've noticed that my 8 year old Samsung phone, which just a few years ago was still easily usable has gotten quite a bit slower when loading websites nowadays.
I'll still use the same phone for 10 years and download custom APK's for apps, downside is original browser on phone, other lightweight browsers are available. Just like Firefox for windows, it works with smart phones as well.
TH-cam is so beyond bloated it’s insane. Facebook too, Facebook changed their website back in 2020 and ever since then it’s been a pain to use and the new UI is trash anyway, they seem to have followed the trend of making every button and UI element grotesquely huge. Not a fan.
yes...so do I. I don't remember the date but Gmail "recently" retired it's HTML version (for slower hardware) and that pretty much concluded the "usefulness" of my AspireOne Netbook with Linux. Today it's speed is similar to what dial-up was like 1999.
I was not expecting much, but that A4-1200 is less than half of the speed of entry level Core2Duos of 2007. It's trading blows with Pentium D 805 from early 2005 or mobile Pentium 4s from 2004. It's 20-times slower than Ryzen 3 1200 and 40-times slower than Ryzen 5 1600. Maybe it's worth proving your point on CPU that wasn't equal to two decades old entry level CPUs.
I don't remember the exact CPU but I installed Debian on a netbook from around the same time and it worked ok - until you tried to browse the internet.
I've been speaking with friends about the need for man in the middle proxy servers for older hardware, this video cements the need for such a device in my mind.
Bloat is like a gas. It expands to fill whatever container it finds itself in. In small/old systems, of course, it applies an explosive level of pressure.
This is something I noticed some years ago when toying with my Acer Aspire One. I could do plenty of things with it... but TH-cam, for instance, killed it completely.
It's because TH-cam at its very early age was very simple, they use basic HTML that's extremely light on CPU and GPU, and most video streams back then only use H264 codec that's easy to run on basically almost any hardware Until around 2014 when TH-cam finally deprecated its basic HTML stuff and then started to go full JavaScript mode, it's only getting more and more resource heavy from there
@@sihamhamda47 2014 that was around the time it choked older systems of the time if I recall, worked better after I upgraded them to dual core processors if supported.
True back then TH-cam ran great, the only problem you have to deal with were the abysmal internet speeds which makes pages load slower, and the YT player load/buffer a lot. I remember we had a old Dell Dimention 4600 that had Windows XP installed on a clunky 120 IDE HDD, with 4GB RAM and no dedicated GPU card during the late 2000s to 2013. We used it to browse TH-cam and Myspace (which had a ton of looping gifs, bakcground music, and multiple youtube videos playing in the background) and it ran fine.
I agree with this, but only partially. There were computers sold that weren't good even when new. All eras of computers have systems like that. The laptop in this video is such an example. Even when new, it wasn't a good computer.
The browsers are also the issue. In Linux you can search youtube from the terminal and play the video bare. I use ytfzf which is youtube fuzzy fetch which lets me do just that. It cuts out the middle man. It just gives me the video by itself.
Yes, personally I am very fond of SMTube that gives a new lease of life to these old computers by simply browsing a simplified version of TH-cam and passing the video URL directly to a local player, bypassing all the javascript nonsense and the hungry video players that browsers rely on these days. Also people underestimate how much more resource heavy it made by having TLS enabled everywhere for everything. These old computers just can't cope with having to decrypt TLS and all that Javascript nonsense that the modern web demands nowadays just to render a simple page.
That is just wrong. Absolutely unnecessary to need a PC from atleast 2017 just to browse the web. I use a Core2Duo machine from 2008 with no issues online. Can even run windows 11 if I want but I prefer 10.
If you uograde GPU to one that decodes YT format, then it is easier. VP9 codecs if I recall correctly. Source: using 8570w with quadro rtx with said codecs
Your laptop is WAY more powerful than his. In passmark benchmark terms, your cpu does 6253 points, and his AMD does 369. And you have a lot more ram. Night and day between your case and his!
That's a high end machine, I think he was meaning old more basic hardware. With your spec you could still run modern games at low settings. The one in the video would struggle to run UrbanTerror probably.
Best thing to do with these older machines is to use them in some kind of remote desktop mode or cloud mode where all the processing happens on the other end and all the machine needs to do is display a video feed that it would be able to do hardware accelerated at the machine itself. Does anybody remember trying to get that broadcom PCI card for their netbooks so they could actually play TH-cam on it? I do.
Windows 7 is the only thing making my 13" 2013 macbook pro usable. I can play a fair few modern games but still get 100% cpu usage playing 1080p youtube videos. Very cool.
I set up my old Lenovo G50-45 for my father. It has an AMD A6-6310 APU with Raedon R4 (Beema) graphics and 8GB DDR3 RAM, and runs deepin 23. Browser of choice is the latest stable Mozilla Firefox with uBlock Origin and Consent-o-Matic. Performance is surprisingly good.
I run Linux and my PC is 14 years old now and the experience is still snappy enough for me. If hardware was better today I'd consider upgrading but it just isn't. New PC stuff sucks. I've been looking at it. That's as far as it's gone too. I want external drive bays in a case. I don't need a window either. Or RGB.
Interesting perspective. I never looked at it quite this way before. I'll use this video to demonstrate to people how hard to run the modern internet is. People didn't notice because it got harder to run slowly over time.
CSS is also a CPU killer if you don't have hardware acceleration. Disabling it will render websites in a very simple, unstructured way but it will be readable. Pair it with an adblock extension and you will have no problem browsing the web even on older computers.
Linux has those services too. Stuff related to freedesktop like dbus. I've run into issues with it. An arcane incantation like this can fix it dbus-update-activation-environment --systemd DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS DISPLAY XAUTHORITY Because of course that's what any reasonable person would think to do.
I have an 14 year old laptop. It's still usable. On Firefox I have some pretty good adblocking and an extension to convert 60fps to 30fps video. I think it's called h264ify or something. That let me continue to use my old laptop quite nicely.
I am a new Linuxer, in a transition from Windows. I have my old ex-Vista Asus F5RL series, which is about 6 years older than yours. It was originally meant to be sold for spare parts, but nobody wanted it, for years. This year I gave it a go with Linux. I fixed the broken hinge (no computing background here, mind you), cleaned the insides, as the fan was going mad, repasted, added a couple GB of RAM, the BIOS recognises just 3GB but physically there are 4GB. The system can run 32bit and also 64bit system. It was struggling with youtube videos on 32bit, but since I installed 64bit Wilma Linux, it runs smoothly. I don't have those issues you showed here and my system is older, but with similar specs, just having 1.75Ghz Pentium, not AMD 1Ghz. I use Brave or adblocks on Firefox. If you say blocking ads consumes some resources, I don't expect it to be more or equal to the ads themselves. Why would anyone use Windows on such an old stuff when old Windows (like your 8.1) is no longer supported, and even on internet at that? It doesn't make sense.
@@1pcfred Not sure I understand. I ran a terminal code to see how much RAM there is, as it was Chinese supply, and they can be fake. I knew what it was before the swap and then after. BIOS is old, doesn't even boot from a usb, but I can guarantee you no video took any RAM in that test.
About 8 (almost 9) years ago, I picked up this PC that would've probably been considered "a gaming PC" in the late 2000s standards. If I recall that correctly, it had 2 gb of RAM and a 2 ghz CPU. It ran windows 8.1. However, this was when Microtrash was forcing everyone to install windows 10 on their computers no matter what. So you see, as that PC had windows 10 on it, it ran so much worse than I initially expected. Now, I probably don't have that right now, but if I did...
Completely agree, I've been using an Atom powered netbook for a while and it's completely unusable on a lot of websites. I finally pre-ordered the GPD pocket 4 to replace the original Pocket that is under-powered for most tasks today.
Yes, I still use old laptops for watching media online. And I'm also bothered by the internet's gluttony of memory and processor. As an interface between a person and the internet, any computer is suitable, but they have made the internet into such a sticky liquid that old computers' engines get stuck. I'm talking about internet protocols, video drivers and texture caption converters and due to the invasive use of advertisements on sites where it is forbidden to use an AD blocker, you can't even use the site if you have it enabled. Whatever we put as an addition to an old device is a load on the hardware that is not suitable for use. I'm talking about dual-core processors and 2GB of RAM. The SSD takes over the RAM overload to some extent, but it can't use the graphics drivers to decode into the old version of the codecs for which the processor was designed. So I see two solutions for such devices: 1. A web interface on a server whose task is to convert the entire page into a video with codecs suitable for the device we are using, similar to GeForce Now. 2. Make an ARM processor chip with dedicated RAM and a Micro SD card that acts as an interface for an Internet cable whose function is to filter and convert and buffer video for an older device. Even better would be to start making computers with interchangeable parts like they used to be. 3 WI-FI m.2 card with an additional processor for decoding and filtering!
I wasn't familiar with a4-1200 so I looked it up. Surprised it was slower than an intel atom from the same era. Even when they were just released, parts of the web were already too bloated for them to run.
you could likely get the laptop working with android x86. the raw power exists in old PCs to render reasonably fast just not in large chunks like more moden PCs. so a smartphone OS should solve that problem.
You know, I'd never considered an x86 version for a laptop. Got so stuck thinking about arm news that I forgot there had to be another version which would work. But these haven't been getting updates in a long time, I suppose?
I’m so used to people working and computing within limits and constraint - it made people extremely efficient with code and software etc.; and often think outside the box on ways to “get the most of” memory etc. We are truly spoilt with our absolutely insane memory availabilities and hard-drive sizes. For me, computing never changed, so I still use a laptop from 2003. I see no need to keep adopting ever-increasing (and with price as well) computing requirements. The operating systems and software nowadays are pathetically un-optimized and sloppy. And don’t even bring up “subscription” software, bah! Absolutely ridiculous.
As a fellow enjoyer of older/obscure/weird hardware, I definitely know what you mean. It's been a decent while since I've been able to truly mess around with older hardware due to space constraints of the last 6 or so years, but recently upon firing up some older hardware I was a bit saddened that now a Core 2 Duo is no longer sufficient for internet browsing. I know it's an old CPU but a few years ago it was still perfectly happy with web browsing. Now, the Core 2 Quad is on the edge of usable. I'm sure a large part of this is that processors that old are missing a great many instruction sets that have now been used for 10 years or more, but it seems really lame that just displaying text and basic graphics and extremely low bitrate video would require a 4th gen i5 or better.....
You're totally right. A lot of computing tasks have all sorts of lightweight alternatives, which helps a great deal. But the modern web is a different thing altogether. With the likes of TH-cam, my go to is a dedicated GUI frontend like FreeTube, which for me performs far better than the JavaScript laden actual website. But yes for other web tasks, its harder finding workable alternatives. It still surprises me that my old Thinkpad X200 handles everything including the web quite fine. I'm a Linux guy so naturally it runs a lightweight environment, but as your experience attests, the actual web is a different kettle of fish and it handles it well. Not bad for a machine from 2008! I guess the Core 2 Duos from that era held up well, plus it has an SSD and extra ram added since it came out too.
You know,i always wondered why they can't do the same stuff they used to do anymore. I get why they couldn't run modern software or playback videos in 2k or some insane resolution but if they were able to do 480p or 1080 when they were new why can't they even do 240p now since the video quality is literally the same? For some computers it's not even possible to browse a generic newspaper page or just Facebook. This just shows how heavy and bloated the internet is today,and most likely planned obsolence too. If you also noticed even Windows becomes harder to run on the same machine after some updates - stock Windows 7 was fast and then it felt slower on some computers after SP1 with all updates. Windows 10 was also very fast even on LGA 775 when it came out but now it's barely usable on that hardware anymore
They can't do 240p because modern codecs need some sort of acceleration or raw power. 240p videos nowadays have few hundred kilobytes, in the 00s they were uncompressed or compressed with much less efficient codecs and the size was easily 20-times bigger and still looked like vomit.
I use fully up to date windows 10 and 11 on many LGA775 machines with Core2Duo and Core2Quad and I have no issues. Not slow one bit, I agree with you on everything else though.
I totally agree with you the internet is killing old computer hardware, most websites and developers expect you to have the latest of hardware in order to browse and check their content. Tbh it really sucks and scummy af not everyone has the large sum of money to upgrade or buy new hardware, and also not everyone is an expert when it comes to tech hardware. Also alot of people can be scammed in to buying brand new laptops but the hardware is weak (like the newer Intel Atom and Celerons with Windows 10 or 11 installed) on par with a 2008 to early 2010s laptop models. I own a couple of old desktop and laptops, first my daily driver a old 2013 custom computer I built which has a Intel Pentium g3220 dual core CPU, AMD R5 240, 16GB RAM, 128 SSD, 1TB HDD. The second a 2011 Acer Aspire 4750z laptop, and lastly a 2009 HP G60 laptop. They're all running a modded Windows 10 LITE ISO (meant for low end computers) and their own custom iGPU drivers, partnered with Firefox, Supermium, Mypal, Kmeleon browsers plus extensions/addons like Ublock Origin, H264ify, etc. max RAM, SSD as their main drive OS just to make them usable for today's internet. I'm glad my computers are still able to browse and watch content online "smoothly", imagine other people who know nothing about tech hardware, computer optimization and doesn't have money to buy new hardware. They're only option is to either buy new updated laptops or switch over to Lightweight Linux distros. I'm guessing in a few years it'll get much worst even if some low end developers doing their best to make old hardware usable for low income consumers.
I am nearing 50, female, no formal computing background. Just this year I started going Linux, out of frustration that I had to do quite advanced troubleshooting on Win10. I have been utilising the chat gptt, which I find much more useful than the browser's one. Just now I asked when this and that laptop hit the market. The browser's one had no idea, gpt gave me proper answers. I am no computer tech, far from it, but thanks to the bot I have even manually partitioned new nvme and installed linux components on each partition individually, so I could clone another linux distro next to it on another partition, from having it installed on a usb as an OS with persistence. All this thanks to the chat bot. I wouldn't dare to go linux without the chat bot. If I can do it, anyone can do it. Backing up the system before messing with it is a must, to avoid unnecessary frustration. I messed up my linux installation, but I had a functioning clone and recovered the whole system in under 10 minutes. I am far from being an expert, just invested in external drives for backing up this and that. And that should be a thing for everyone, whatever system they use - to back up, at least 2 additional copies. Ransomware can hit when you expect it the least, or the hardware failure. You never know.
Ads are an issue even on the latest and most powerful machines. I have seen 400%+ (4 full cores or more) cpu usage and 10GB+ memory usage minutes after regular Google browsing. The problem is the site bloat and/or the browser, not the system itself. I love the demonstration though.
Look up have to install batocera on old laptops. Hardware still very good for playin old arcades and retrogames. There is nothing wrong with your laptop. The problem is that developers killing old tec with software so they have to buy new computers so they can make money. The greed for money.
When I was studying electronic engineering in the late 90s my software design lecturer actually said "don't worry if your program doesn't run fast enough, faster CPUs will come along just a year later...😮
@ todays updates are for new tec. And be forzed to installing those big updates on 10y old tec Will make it slower. People didnt buy enough electronics 2024 coz the tec still runs great on win10. So now they want them to install win11.. so the hardware dont work anymore.. i guess a fresh new install of win10 and Never Connect it to internet for updates is the best way to preserve old hardware
When browsers started requiring SSE2/3 a lot of old Pentium III's, 32-bit AMD CPUs and other old CPUs like Cyrix were kicked off the modern internet. It will not be long before only 64-bit CPUs are supported by browsers.
To be fair by the time that happened in the mid 2010s the pentium 3 was quite useless for any modern browsing. I used one back in 2010 and it was the last time it was fine. At worst maybe some of the old althlons that perform better than a p3 got cut off prematurely due to the SSE2 requirements.
I realised this some years ago while browsing the Net with my PIII 1.2GHz 256mb RAM laptop, NEC Versa Aptitude....one hell of a laptop backthen.....serving for more than than 10 yrs
Totally agree. Internet should be much more lightweight. PHP websites were way better 😂 11:17 come on, at that moment yep, it’s high. but it was less for the last minute. still slow but the CPU usage was less (obviously). Also, there’s plugin to get back 2012 TH-cam UI called V3. I suppose, it will improve the YT performance on such hardware (I use it on modern hardware, because I like old UIs)
the NoScript Addon might be worth a try. (alongside often mentioned ad block). Sadly, a lot of site don't function without massive amounts of JS, but a hand full are just working "good enough". Maybe not beautiful, but if it's just text anyway what you are after, why not?
You'll have to do a bit of fiddling around temporarily allowing JS from certain domains to find what's actually needed to make a given site work if it's heavy on the JS. The main annoyance I run into is payment systems where it's not obvious which of the dozen domains a shop is getting its scripts from is providing the scripts needed for getting the payment to work. Still, being able to avoid a lot of unnecessary JS does help speed things up.
Video resolution technolgies is killing ... soon we will not be able to play old digital videos no more , a lot o memories and historic videos will be lost
Very good points. The old hardware is left behind as usual thanks to the pace of technology and consumerism. I am no different when it comes to following tech. However, there is a good point in what you say. Websites could and should have a heavy and simple interface. Like lite version. This could also reduce internet trafic without causing so many problems. AI can help mass produce these websites.
One major problem for old notebooks and netbooks is that current operating systems don't support their graphics sufficiently, and usually this means no hardware acceleration. So you have to use an outdated OS. But then you are very limited in the choice of your webbrowser, too. And these few specialized webbrowser versions for older PCs then don't support all the features needed for currently using the web. It's a chain of sadness :( And btw: From my countless tries on different systems with many OSses, Linux isn't any better on older hardware than Windows.- actually it's worse, because there are kind of modern tools for older Windows versions. But using an old Linux distributions mostly means being stuck to old software, too.
Not only would I attribute the issue on resource-intensive Javascript code, I'd also attribute the issue on dependence on graphics (e.g. canvases, WebGL) and video that would run much slower without hardware acceleration. I wish there were software implementations that would render web pages not exactly the same, but with significantly less resources. For example, many software 3D graphics didn't have shading nor texture filtering.
@mistersync100 It's a china registered xiaomi redmi 5a and got region-locked. I did however install shizuku and removed google and MIUI stuff I can safely remove, but it still only about 35% of usable storage
There was once a point in time where web designers were optimizing their code for use on a 56k modem. The web really became too bloated for its own good right around the time Microsoft labeled windows 7 end of life. TH-cam has recently switched to an av1 codec for its videos and it will easily tax even some more recent hardware. For example there are some smartphones that are still supported and some that are still being sold that don’t have an av1 decoder built in. This results in a device like that to rely upon the cpu to decode the video which is less efficient and for portable devices usually results in more power being drained from the battery than it all would have just a couple years ago. My own experience is that TH-cam music will barely work on laptop from 2004 and that is if you have premium to avoid the video ads. The result is an experience that will lag easily if anything else attempts to process at the same time as my laptop is only has single core. To think that there was once a point in time where TH-cam used flash player to render videos on your browser and could even work on a computer running windows 98 using a version of opera design for windows xp by shoehorning it in using kernelx
In 2002 a work colleague was toying with making web pages. He showed me what he's doing and the stuff was full of bells and whistles. Interesting but it took forever to load. It was 1MB and even when I pointed out that it takes a minute to load he was purposefully blind to that part of user experience. 5, 10 and 20 years of web development later proved him right and confirmed the joke was on me. That's why I don't touch web development with a 20 feet pole. I don't want to be near anything that has 'j' and 'script' in the same sentence.
Well I understand your situation. A 2013 netbook was optimized for sparing power, since its cooling system can't handle too much. The incredible thing is that i'm using a 2006 laptop with a 2009 cpu (AMD Turion X2 ZM-85), and is 220% more powerful than yours but has ten times the TDP of your CPU! If you want to compare CPUs I suggest you cpubenchmark
Old budget machines definitely feel it in the modern world but old high end machines are still super useful, i am using a core2duo E8400 and pretty much any normal task works with windows 10 or 11 and its not slow either.
Your problem is the AMD A4-1200 dual-core 1GHz. I had similar issues with a Lenovo X131 laptop running the same processor. What I did was upgrade the motherboard (since I couldn't upgrade the processor on that motherboard) to an Intel i3. I also used a very lightweight linux distro (Catchy OS)...there are several lightweight distros you can try. Lastly, I installed Brave as my browser (with UBlock Origin), along with the enhanced-h264ify extension from the Chrome store (that extension blocks VP8/VP9 codecs on TH-cam, enabling H.264 playback, which is less intensive on your cpu). Max out the ram, add an SSD, and you're ready to go browsing!! I didn't see any intel options for that motherboard, and it looks like Asus does the proprietary thing, so it's likely ewaste (though you can likely salvage the SSD and memory). My rule of thumb is to get old (not new) Lenovo Thinkpads (perferably business class), you have more options for parts. And stay away from any old Laptops with AMD processors (or Intel Celerons), as those were cheap garbage parts.
I have had to move to 6th Gen Intel mobile, rather than 4th Gen, as some of these sites are just too much. But I can still find these laptops for $200 or less on eBay. I would go newer, but those laptops come with a fixed amount of RAM, soldered on.
Great topic/video,Finally someone has posted this issue for 411 references, The only vid that attempts to address this issue on the WWW! HP G61-320CA, 8 GB DDR2 RAM,870 EVO SSD, only good for 360-480 on YT, 720 buffers/freezes using ethernet connection LOL
Up until about 2 years ago I was still using a Core2Duo HP nx9420 laptop i rescued from a skip, maxed out the ram, ssd and highest clock speed cpu it would take and it ran just fine on windows 7. I could watch TH-cam in 1080@60 on about 85/90% cpu usage. Then support ended and i had to use win10. I could only get 720@60 or just normal 1080 but it was on the ragged edge a dropped frames sometimes. It was semi retired to garage use last year until the graphics card (actual removeable card!) gave up.
I think it's a bit of A and a bit of B. The Asus x102B was panned for its slow performance even back when it was released, and from what I remember it was sort of a bottom-of-the-barrel Chromebook competitor back in the day. With that said I do think the internet has become more form over function, with flashy graphics and presentation being more important than writing efficient code. Ads also have to take part of the blame, and personally I run adblockers on all my devices. I also think a lot of website developers only make sites for what they believe is the current day average computer, which in most cases are more than capable of handling sub-optimal coding. As a bit of a tangent, this was written on my 10 year old Dell Latitude E7240, with an i7-4600U, 8 GB of RAM and a 120 GB SSD, running Debian. It can run all the websites I visit just fine, as long as I don't go overboard and have a million tabs open at the same time.
I guess I just don't expect a good surf on old hardware. Short of a sort of thin client interface to something with more power the physical limitations are significant and there's no real incentive for web content creators to provide a legacy content format. They're pushing the latest. That's where the profit is. As you said old hardware can still be useful for other applications such as a stripped down media player, small personal server or controller especially if it's low power.
This is why Debian and Ublock Origin is your friend. I have an EEE PC given to me by my dad before he passed and on Windows it was a strugglebus but on Debian with XFCE and Ublock Origin on Chromium it is an okay netbook again. Loads web pages just fine, does 720p video with H.264ify with only a couple dropped frames at the start, it is never going to be a speed demon but for looking up something or using it as a YT music jukebox? Still keeps humming along.
I use an old Dell Inspiron every now and then. It was designed to run Windows Vista, and Windows 8 was too much for that poor machine. It has Linux Mint XFCE for its OS. I can use that laptop to do most anything right now, and it's great at ripping CDs. TH-cam videos are the bane of its existence. There are times where I have to dial the resolution to the lowest setting to allow it to show anything. But, that laptop isn't e-waste.
I watched this video with my Windows XP computer (hardware from around 2014, I made that choice to only install Windows XP to it). For some sites I have Opera 9.64 (seriously), latest Google Chrome it handles, latest Firefox it handles (for email since Chrome made the processing 100% for just the email page existing making everything slower) and for actual internet browsing otherwise, a browser Mypal with of course, an adblock software (well, all browsers have one). Works pretty well, though some sites just suck with all the unnecessary stuff they got. Also I have a Win 7 computer (laptop), using the latest Chrome and some version Firefox. Firefox makes the whole PC slow to use when the process just exists. Videos and such playback just fine up to 720p60 or so. Would want more RAM to it though, attempts are made and they have failed. Web sure has gone downhill for the last 15-20 years.
Let me help you out here. I have an old HP laptop. Notebook 2000. It has an e300 APU dual core1.2 gigahertz. What I did was to install Debian Linux server only. Then by command line installed window manager Open Box. You'll have to search around because it's not going to be easy. With old PCS and today's internet you practically had to customize an install to cut out a lot of the bloat. I installed Brave browser by following the instructions on their website. Then I follow the instructions to set experimental flags to help boost performance within the browser. The initial TH-cam download is slow. But I have bandage to get good video playback. 480p VP9 and 720P AVC utilizing the enhanced YIFY X 265 browser add-on. There's probably a lot more bloat I can't block. My next thing is maybe to try RAMDisk so the cache would go to memory rather than the drive. Which is a spinning rust by the way
would say there things javascript does that my old g series pentium can't really do when loading certain websites. Otherwise I think the bigger issues is simply just windows being windows, and its need to be so heavy is causing issues now for older processors ( and the same could be said for low end modern processors for super cheap sub 100$ laptop which are more or less equal capability) that causes them to be so slow (as well how much stuff on the internet is heavier as it needs to be web app). Wouldn't be surprised if microsoft decided to start dropping support for older cpu instruction sets in a botch attempt to be less heavy and bloat rather than deal with a lot the more real issues with window on older or weaker processors
Why are you waiting for ads? Seriously, this is 2024. Block them! I haven't seen an ad for over 10 years. You also need a 2-way firewall like Simplewall then block everything that doesn't need internet access. Works a treat on Win11 to stop forced updates, just says 'no internet try later' lol
this is another reason why ad blocking is important
ads significantly impact performance
blocking itself already uses some resources....
@@miekkbblocking is invoked on page load and then on events. It's not some constantly running code in the background. Yes it's extra code that runs but it blocks way more code of the ads from running
@@miekkb if you use ublock origin that'll pretty much never be a problem
even the lower quality adblocking extensions will probably be less detrimental than the ads
That's actually how I got into Ad blocking in the first place. One time I noticed that on some web page, the loading was always slow. When I took a closer look, I found that it is only caused by loading ads. As then Ad blockers were already present (maybe one of the earlier versions of what later became Adblock Plus), I gave it a shot and was amazed how fast everything loaded suddenly. I have never ever browsed the web without ad blockers ever since.
@@miekkb find the youtuber who are threatened with adblocks
The internet is full of bloat and unoptimized code. Even something that looks super simple like the Google homepage has gotten more complicated than it was say 20 years ago. I miss the days when the internet had quality content, not flashy and fancy looking websites that have about 4 times the amount of code than they actually need to have.
it's always been like this though. it's not that it's old, it's that they don't have enough cache. I had a celeron D with 256KB of cache in the 2000s and it was slow with any sort of web media would make my system instantly unusable. even when technology improved with 4-cores around 2010 systems still struggled because the CPUs were getting faster but the RAM wasn't developed quick enough to process web content and media.
I remember first using the Internet with Lynx and Archie lol.
The sad part is that programmers nowadays don't know about optimization or are discouraged against doing this process as the notion that reigns technology is "Unused resources are wasted resources". Basically translates as "You should make your/people's PC run at 100% at all times"
I've met programmers that say things like "It's optimized! The more you have, the more it uses!" And try to do as many mental backflips to the point the discussion stops making sense.
I would say this whole thing is to push newer and newer devices OR to de-place the computer market and favor the phone one instead. (Which is less expensive to upgrade every 2-4 years like it is common for people to do now). I would much prefer to keep my devices for 12 years.
@@carlosdasilva2409 I also live in this painful world. I come from a place where people made great things with 48k of ram. I get that it's time consuming to write everything in asm these days but the waste with javascript frameworks and the way people use them is just totally bonkers.
Same problem happened in game development.
Javascript was a mistake
javascript IS a mistake
Such an underrated comment.
It’s less JavaScript that’s the problem than the constraints within which most web development takes place. Most page scripts are written using frameworks which focus on developer productivity rather than runtime performance. Most developers are working in companies where pushing out new features is prioritised over client-side performance tuning. And they’re usually working on hardware that’s only a couple of years old with current browser builds so runs JS without breaking a sweat. Add to that the advertising bloat, the tracker cookies, the use of graphics for ‘aesthetic’ rather than functional purposes, the pervasive use of SSL for content which doesn’t need encryption…
@@EleanorMcHugh racker cookies, are getting insain, the there 30+ on almost every webpage you visit, today, and there doing apserlutly nothing for the end user
@@EleanorMcHugh Absolutely, that is my experience too from the time when it was more widely introduced. I did try it, but for formal webpages, like the local communal instances i always used handwritten HTML in order to speed up the loading process, but also beacuse it was easier to maintain the site for people with limited knowledge of the basic of scripts. I made textblocks which where easy to change and also hidden instructions in the script so the person maintaining the site would see what everything did in the script according to my instructions and it could easily be done in notepad or any similar text editor and then just copy and paste if they needed to change anything. Also i made the text format and the choose of letters, contrast colours, etc pretty much as the instructions for army printings, in a way even elder people could easily see and read the pages and see where they was internaly linked, etc. And also with letters most people had as default on a regular home computer. As booring as they where, There was no complains about those... ha ha
Old smartphones have same problem.
I like to install a custom operating system like lineage os or kai os
Also install differt laucher like the evie launcher and simple keyboard
Remove moving animation in developer moder
Yeah, I've noticed that my 8 year old Samsung phone, which just a few years ago was still easily usable has gotten quite a bit slower when loading websites nowadays.
I'll still use the same phone for 10 years and download custom APK's for apps, downside is original browser on phone, other lightweight browsers are available. Just like Firefox for windows, it works with smart phones as well.
Crazily, my old core 2 duo pc can actually game faster (modern games, mind you), than it plays youtube videos
TH-cam is so beyond bloated it’s insane. Facebook too, Facebook changed their website back in 2020 and ever since then it’s been a pain to use and the new UI is trash anyway, they seem to have followed the trend of making every button and UI element grotesquely huge. Not a fan.
Yeah, a Core 2 Duo still can run very well an adjusted and tweaked Windows 10, 4GB of RAM (if you can) and an SSD.
I still remember when websites that offered a lite version of their site for people with slow connections
yes...so do I. I don't remember the date but Gmail "recently" retired it's HTML version (for slower hardware) and that pretty much concluded the "usefulness" of my AspireOne Netbook with Linux. Today it's speed is similar to what dial-up was like 1999.
Then you could get away with the mobile version but even that is heavy now with inline video ads, etc.
For that A4-1200, I can guarantee that it was stuck at 100% CPU usage when it was new...
I was not expecting much, but that A4-1200 is less than half of the speed of entry level Core2Duos of 2007. It's trading blows with Pentium D 805 from early 2005 or mobile Pentium 4s from 2004. It's 20-times slower than Ryzen 3 1200 and 40-times slower than Ryzen 5 1600. Maybe it's worth proving your point on CPU that wasn't equal to two decades old entry level CPUs.
I don't remember the exact CPU but I installed Debian on a netbook from around the same time and it worked ok - until you tried to browse the internet.
No, it wasn’t.
Yeah, this video features the wrong extreme of the examples. It should show a perfectly capable hardware that MS simply does not support anymore.
Oh yes the AMD A4/A6/A8 line... such a sluggish processor.
I've been speaking with friends about the need for man in the middle proxy servers for older hardware, this video cements the need for such a device in my mind.
Is this related to TH-cam hiring content stream companies acting as somewhat a cache to improve streaming?
Honestly, modern hardware needs adblockers too
I need an ad blocker just for my own personal sanity. Scammer please.
Bloat is like a gas. It expands to fill whatever container it finds itself in. In small/old systems, of course, it applies an explosive level of pressure.
This is something I noticed some years ago when toying with my Acer Aspire One. I could do plenty of things with it... but TH-cam, for instance, killed it completely.
Agreed....youtube and the discontinuation of Gmail (html version).
frogfinder + ublock origin + popup blocker strict
I remember when youtube worked fine on a single core early 2000's system, then suddenly it needed a dual core and progressed from there.
It's because TH-cam at its very early age was very simple, they use basic HTML that's extremely light on CPU and GPU, and most video streams back then only use H264 codec that's easy to run on basically almost any hardware
Until around 2014 when TH-cam finally deprecated its basic HTML stuff and then started to go full JavaScript mode, it's only getting more and more resource heavy from there
@@sihamhamda47 2014 that was around the time it choked older systems of the time if I recall, worked better after I upgraded them to dual core processors if supported.
yes. i watched my first yt video on a 32 bit athlon
True back then TH-cam ran great, the only problem you have to deal with were the abysmal internet speeds which makes pages load slower, and the YT player load/buffer a lot. I remember we had a old Dell Dimention 4600 that had Windows XP installed on a clunky 120 IDE HDD, with 4GB RAM and no dedicated GPU card during the late 2000s to 2013. We used it to browse TH-cam and Myspace (which had a ton of looping gifs, bakcground music, and multiple youtube videos playing in the background) and it ran fine.
@@JacobJohnson-lh4gx I forgot about slow internet speeds back then, youtube needed buffering with basic 512kbps adsl we had back then.
I agree with this, but only partially. There were computers sold that weren't good even when new. All eras of computers have systems like that.
The laptop in this video is such an example. Even when new, it wasn't a good computer.
The browsers are also the issue. In Linux you can search youtube from the terminal and play the video bare. I use ytfzf which is youtube fuzzy fetch which lets me do just that. It cuts out the middle man. It just gives me the video by itself.
In Windows too
Another option is vlc player. I've never tried it myself but it's supposed to be capable of playing youtube videos.
Well done. Sticking it to The Man!
Yes, personally I am very fond of SMTube that gives a new lease of life to these old computers by simply browsing a simplified version of TH-cam and passing the video URL directly to a local player, bypassing all the javascript nonsense and the hungry video players that browsers rely on these days. Also people underestimate how much more resource heavy it made by having TLS enabled everywhere for everything. These old computers just can't cope with having to decrypt TLS and all that Javascript nonsense that the modern web demands nowadays just to render a simple page.
This is why I don't use any machine older than 2017 on the internet. Even an eighth gen i5 struggles.
That is just wrong. Absolutely unnecessary to need a PC from atleast 2017 just to browse the web. I use a Core2Duo machine from 2008 with no issues online. Can even run windows 11 if I want but I prefer 10.
Still running i5 2320 going strong for browsing.
My 4th gen i5 is still hanging in there. It's a trooper.
Don't forget about the operating systems like windows that's killing old hardware too
You need an ad blocker..... even on good pcs blockers are a must.
Ad blockers consume a lot of resources themselves. It's a lot of work to block all of that nonsense.
@@1pcfred at least its using those resources for something good
Those AMD A series CPU's weren't worth a crap even when they were new.
They were truly awful, the old turions were better.
Just like the Intel Atoms.
back when i was a kid i remember how optimized websites where. youtube especially.
I use a 10 year old ZBook 15 G2 with a i7-4910MQ / 32GB Ram / 2TB M2 SSD / 2 GB GPU, using Win10/Firefox with Ad Blocking, still going strong.
just use brave browser which gives better performance increment.
that has 8mb of cache. the cpu in this clip has only 1mb
If you uograde GPU to one that decodes YT format, then it is easier. VP9 codecs if I recall correctly. Source: using 8570w with quadro rtx with said codecs
Your laptop is WAY more powerful than his. In passmark benchmark terms, your cpu does 6253 points, and his AMD does 369. And you have a lot more ram. Night and day between your case and his!
That's a high end machine, I think he was meaning old more basic hardware. With your spec you could still run modern games at low settings. The one in the video would struggle to run UrbanTerror probably.
Best thing to do with these older machines is to use them in some kind of remote desktop mode or cloud mode where all the processing happens on the other end and all the machine needs to do is display a video feed that it would be able to do hardware accelerated at the machine itself.
Does anybody remember trying to get that broadcom PCI card for their netbooks so they could actually play TH-cam on it? I do.
Cloud service fails as well😂
Windows 7 is the only thing making my 13" 2013 macbook pro usable. I can play a fair few modern games but still get 100% cpu usage playing 1080p youtube videos. Very cool.
I run Linux Mint on a Macbook Air 2011 without a problem.
I try to keep old PCs in mind any time I redesign my own website(s). I don't even force https because it breaks too many old browsers.
I set up my old Lenovo G50-45 for my father. It has an AMD A6-6310 APU with Raedon R4 (Beema) graphics and 8GB DDR3 RAM, and runs deepin 23. Browser of choice is the latest stable Mozilla Firefox with uBlock Origin and Consent-o-Matic. Performance is surprisingly good.
Yeah, one can't change the website creators. What we all could do is to make our desktops and laptops run faster - switching to Linux!
I run Linux and my PC is 14 years old now and the experience is still snappy enough for me. If hardware was better today I'd consider upgrading but it just isn't. New PC stuff sucks. I've been looking at it. That's as far as it's gone too. I want external drive bays in a case. I don't need a window either. Or RGB.
Interesting perspective. I never looked at it quite this way before. I'll use this video to demonstrate to people how hard to run the modern internet is. People didn't notice because it got harder to run slowly over time.
I've noticed this after upgrading a 10 year old laptop. 16gb of ram and an ssd drive, but the CPU is getting hit while idle on a website.
Amd e1?
There are a number of 'mobile' versions of websites which still work. There is an m dot version of TH-cam and an m dot version of Facebook.
CSS is also a CPU killer if you don't have hardware acceleration. Disabling it will render websites in a very simple, unstructured way but it will be readable. Pair it with an adblock extension and you will have no problem browsing the web even on older computers.
Cant imagine where smart TVs will be 6-10 yrs from now
the Samsun [ZEN] TV's are buggy sht already so I'm thinking the trash bin??
Sometimes it is an MS service that uses all the cpu capacity. That has been my experience. When that service finishes what is doing things speed up.
Linux has those services too. Stuff related to freedesktop like dbus. I've run into issues with it. An arcane incantation like this can fix it dbus-update-activation-environment --systemd DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS DISPLAY XAUTHORITY Because of course that's what any reasonable person would think to do.
I have an 14 year old laptop. It's still usable. On Firefox I have some pretty good adblocking and an extension to convert 60fps to 30fps video. I think it's called h264ify or something. That let me continue to use my old laptop quite nicely.
I'm sure Steve Jobs said this would end when flash was replaced by html5 ;)
Steve Jobs tried to cure cancer with carrots too. So there's that.
Those old atom systems were garbage and slow back then. Trying to get them to work today is a lesson in patience.
I am a new Linuxer, in a transition from Windows. I have my old ex-Vista Asus F5RL series, which is about 6 years older than yours. It was originally meant to be sold for spare parts, but nobody wanted it, for years. This year I gave it a go with Linux. I fixed the broken hinge (no computing background here, mind you), cleaned the insides, as the fan was going mad, repasted, added a couple GB of RAM, the BIOS recognises just 3GB but physically there are 4GB. The system can run 32bit and also 64bit system. It was struggling with youtube videos on 32bit, but since I installed 64bit Wilma Linux, it runs smoothly. I don't have those issues you showed here and my system is older, but with similar specs, just having 1.75Ghz Pentium, not AMD 1Ghz. I use Brave or adblocks on Firefox. If you say blocking ads consumes some resources, I don't expect it to be more or equal to the ads themselves.
Why would anyone use Windows on such an old stuff when old Windows (like your 8.1) is no longer supported, and even on internet at that? It doesn't make sense.
Your video is probably using a GB of RAM. So that's where that went.
@@1pcfred Not sure I understand. I ran a terminal code to see how much RAM there is, as it was Chinese supply, and they can be fake. I knew what it was before the swap and then after. BIOS is old, doesn't even boot from a usb, but I can guarantee you no video took any RAM in that test.
About 8 (almost 9) years ago, I picked up this PC that would've probably been considered "a gaming PC" in the late 2000s standards. If I recall that correctly, it had 2 gb of RAM and a 2 ghz CPU. It ran windows 8.1. However, this was when Microtrash was forcing everyone to install windows 10 on their computers no matter what. So you see, as that PC had windows 10 on it, it ran so much worse than I initially expected.
Now, I probably don't have that right now, but if I did...
Netbook for life...
there is no enough computing power to remove all idiocracy, future is looking bleek and dark
I have an 8c/16t Xeon and 96GB of DDR3 ram that struggles with some newer websites.
What's your GPU and do you use SSD?
I find that hard to believe..I browse the web flawlessly on Core2Duo systems.
Completely agree, I've been using an Atom powered netbook for a while and it's completely unusable on a lot of websites. I finally pre-ordered the GPD pocket 4 to replace the original Pocket that is under-powered for most tasks today.
Yes, I still use old laptops for watching media online. And I'm also bothered by the internet's gluttony of memory and processor. As an interface between a person and the internet, any computer is suitable, but they have made the internet into such a sticky liquid that old computers' engines get stuck. I'm talking about internet protocols, video drivers and texture caption converters and due to the invasive use of advertisements on sites where it is forbidden to use an AD blocker, you can't even use the site if you have it enabled. Whatever we put as an addition to an old device is a load on the hardware that is not suitable for use. I'm talking about dual-core processors and 2GB of RAM. The SSD takes over the RAM overload to some extent, but it can't use the graphics drivers to decode into the old version of the codecs for which the processor was designed. So I see two solutions for such devices: 1. A web interface on a server whose task is to convert the entire page into a video with codecs suitable for the device we are using, similar to GeForce Now. 2. Make an ARM processor chip with dedicated RAM and a Micro SD card that acts as an interface for an Internet cable whose function is to filter and convert and buffer video for an older device. Even better would be to start making computers with interchangeable parts like they used to be. 3 WI-FI m.2 card with an additional processor for decoding and filtering!
Also encryption makes it very hard on old computers without hardware accelerators ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I wasn't familiar with a4-1200 so I looked it up. Surprised it was slower than an intel atom from the same era. Even when they were just released, parts of the web were already too bloated for them to run.
you could likely get the laptop working with android x86. the raw power exists in old PCs to render reasonably fast just not in large chunks like more moden PCs. so a smartphone OS should solve that problem.
You know, I'd never considered an x86 version for a laptop. Got so stuck thinking about arm news that I forgot there had to be another version which would work. But these haven't been getting updates in a long time, I suppose?
Thank you sir for making old stuff
bcz I love old stuff!!
I’m so used to people working and computing within limits and constraint - it made people extremely efficient with code and software etc.; and often think outside the box on ways to “get the most of” memory etc. We are truly spoilt with our absolutely insane memory availabilities and hard-drive sizes. For me, computing never changed, so I still use a laptop from 2003. I see no need to keep adopting ever-increasing (and with price as well) computing requirements. The operating systems and software nowadays are pathetically un-optimized and sloppy. And don’t even bring up “subscription” software, bah! Absolutely ridiculous.
Congratulations on passing the 2K subscribers.
As a fellow enjoyer of older/obscure/weird hardware, I definitely know what you mean. It's been a decent while since I've been able to truly mess around with older hardware due to space constraints of the last 6 or so years, but recently upon firing up some older hardware I was a bit saddened that now a Core 2 Duo is no longer sufficient for internet browsing. I know it's an old CPU but a few years ago it was still perfectly happy with web browsing. Now, the Core 2 Quad is on the edge of usable. I'm sure a large part of this is that processors that old are missing a great many instruction sets that have now been used for 10 years or more, but it seems really lame that just displaying text and basic graphics and extremely low bitrate video would require a 4th gen i5 or better.....
You're totally right. A lot of computing tasks have all sorts of lightweight alternatives, which helps a great deal. But the modern web is a different thing altogether. With the likes of TH-cam, my go to is a dedicated GUI frontend like FreeTube, which for me performs far better than the JavaScript laden actual website. But yes for other web tasks, its harder finding workable alternatives.
It still surprises me that my old Thinkpad X200 handles everything including the web quite fine. I'm a Linux guy so naturally it runs a lightweight environment, but as your experience attests, the actual web is a different kettle of fish and it handles it well. Not bad for a machine from 2008! I guess the Core 2 Duos from that era held up well, plus it has an SSD and extra ram added since it came out too.
You know,i always wondered why they can't do the same stuff they used to do anymore. I get why they couldn't run modern software or playback videos in 2k or some insane resolution but if they were able to do 480p or 1080 when they were new why can't they even do 240p now since the video quality is literally the same? For some computers it's not even possible to browse a generic newspaper page or just Facebook. This just shows how heavy and bloated the internet is today,and most likely planned obsolence too. If you also noticed even Windows becomes harder to run on the same machine after some updates - stock Windows 7 was fast and then it felt slower on some computers after SP1 with all updates. Windows 10 was also very fast even on LGA 775 when it came out but now it's barely usable on that hardware anymore
They can't do 240p because modern codecs need some sort of acceleration or raw power. 240p videos nowadays have few hundred kilobytes, in the 00s they were uncompressed or compressed with much less efficient codecs and the size was easily 20-times bigger and still looked like vomit.
I use fully up to date windows 10 and 11 on many LGA775 machines with Core2Duo and Core2Quad and I have no issues. Not slow one bit, I agree with you on everything else though.
I totally agree with you the internet is killing old computer hardware, most websites and developers expect you to have the latest of hardware in order to browse and check their content. Tbh it really sucks and scummy af not everyone has the large sum of money to upgrade or buy new hardware, and also not everyone is an expert when it comes to tech hardware. Also alot of people can be scammed in to buying brand new laptops but the hardware is weak (like the newer Intel Atom and Celerons with Windows 10 or 11 installed) on par with a 2008 to early 2010s laptop models. I own a couple of old desktop and laptops, first my daily driver a old 2013 custom computer I built which has a Intel Pentium g3220 dual core CPU, AMD R5 240, 16GB RAM, 128 SSD, 1TB HDD. The second a 2011 Acer Aspire 4750z laptop, and lastly a 2009 HP G60 laptop. They're all running a modded Windows 10 LITE ISO (meant for low end computers) and their own custom iGPU drivers, partnered with Firefox, Supermium, Mypal, Kmeleon browsers plus extensions/addons like Ublock Origin, H264ify, etc. max RAM, SSD as their main drive OS just to make them usable for today's internet. I'm glad my computers are still able to browse and watch content online "smoothly", imagine other people who know nothing about tech hardware, computer optimization and doesn't have money to buy new hardware. They're only option is to either buy new updated laptops or switch over to Lightweight Linux distros. I'm guessing in a few years it'll get much worst even if some low end developers doing their best to make old hardware usable for low income consumers.
I am nearing 50, female, no formal computing background. Just this year I started going Linux, out of frustration that I had to do quite advanced troubleshooting on Win10. I have been utilising the chat gptt, which I find much more useful than the browser's one. Just now I asked when this and that laptop hit the market. The browser's one had no idea, gpt gave me proper answers.
I am no computer tech, far from it, but thanks to the bot I have even manually partitioned new nvme and installed linux components on each partition individually, so I could clone another linux distro next to it on another partition, from having it installed on a usb as an OS with persistence. All this thanks to the chat bot. I wouldn't dare to go linux without the chat bot. If I can do it, anyone can do it. Backing up the system before messing with it is a must, to avoid unnecessary frustration. I messed up my linux installation, but I had a functioning clone and recovered the whole system in under 10 minutes. I am far from being an expert, just invested in external drives for backing up this and that. And that should be a thing for everyone, whatever system they use - to back up, at least 2 additional copies. Ransomware can hit when you expect it the least, or the hardware failure. You never know.
I can't help but wondering if you lack hardware acceleration for the video card?
Ads are an issue even on the latest and most powerful machines. I have seen 400%+ (4 full cores or more) cpu usage and 10GB+ memory usage minutes after regular Google browsing. The problem is the site bloat and/or the browser, not the system itself. I love the demonstration though.
Look up have to install batocera on old laptops. Hardware still very good for playin old arcades and retrogames. There is nothing wrong with your laptop. The problem is that developers killing old tec with software so they have to buy new computers so they can make money. The greed for money.
When I was studying electronic engineering in the late 90s my software design lecturer actually said "don't worry if your program doesn't run fast enough, faster CPUs will come along just a year later...😮
@ todays updates are for new tec. And be forzed to installing those big updates on 10y old tec Will make it slower. People didnt buy enough electronics 2024 coz the tec still runs great on win10. So now they want them to install win11.. so the hardware dont work anymore.. i guess a fresh new install of win10 and Never Connect it to internet for updates is the best way to preserve old hardware
When browsers started requiring SSE2/3 a lot of old Pentium III's, 32-bit AMD CPUs and other old CPUs like Cyrix were kicked off the modern internet. It will not be long before only 64-bit CPUs are supported by browsers.
To be fair by the time that happened in the mid 2010s the pentium 3 was quite useless for any modern browsing. I used one back in 2010 and it was the last time it was fine. At worst maybe some of the old althlons that perform better than a p3 got cut off prematurely due to the SSE2 requirements.
This is totally true, modern web in the old hardwares doesn't work properly unfortunately.
I realised this some years ago while browsing the Net with my PIII 1.2GHz 256mb RAM laptop, NEC Versa Aptitude....one hell of a laptop backthen.....serving for more than than 10 yrs
Totally agree. Internet should be much more lightweight. PHP websites were way better 😂 11:17 come on, at that moment yep, it’s high. but it was less for the last minute. still slow but the CPU usage was less (obviously). Also, there’s plugin to get back 2012 TH-cam UI called V3. I suppose, it will improve the YT performance on such hardware (I use it on modern hardware, because I like old UIs)
the NoScript Addon might be worth a try. (alongside often mentioned ad block). Sadly, a lot of site don't function without massive amounts of JS, but a hand full are just working "good enough". Maybe not beautiful, but if it's just text anyway what you are after, why not?
You'll have to do a bit of fiddling around temporarily allowing JS from certain domains to find what's actually needed to make a given site work if it's heavy on the JS. The main annoyance I run into is payment systems where it's not obvious which of the dozen domains a shop is getting its scripts from is providing the scripts needed for getting the payment to work. Still, being able to avoid a lot of unnecessary JS does help speed things up.
It's not just the websites that are bloated, the browser themselves are memory hogs.
Pi-hole at the firewall is just mandatory at this point. Donate directly to support creators/writers and turn off the ads.
Not so long time ago, laptops like this, was advertised as laptop for light use - internet surfing and watching videos.
there are things like frogfind and 68k news which is meant to squeeze down websites to basic html
and for youtube there is invidious
Modern websites use more cpu than telnet… news at 11…
If my PC was running like that I'd have to bin it. That puppy is slow.
You are very right. My HPt510 struggles to open websites even with lightweight debian.
Web frameworks have become bloated.
my 2012 laptop with an i7-3610qm still works just fine using with the modern web. let's see for how many more years it remains usable
Your laptop has 5120 points on passmark cpu benchmark. His has 369. Not comparable.
Wondering the same thing for my 2008 Dell Inspiron 530 Core2Duo E8500 and 8GB DDR2. Still works perfectly fine.
@@9852323 Your CPU is at 1300 points on passmark, the video poster's it's at 369.
Solution: Google should release a dummed down version of youtube like it has done with gmail. You can have best of the two worlds that way
hey, even Oracle asked Neo to take a cookie at his first visit.
I like cookies
Video resolution technolgies is killing ... soon we will not be able to play old digital videos no more , a lot o memories and historic videos will be lost
Very good points. The old hardware is left behind as usual thanks to the pace of technology and consumerism. I am no different when it comes to following tech. However, there is a good point in what you say. Websites could and should have a heavy and simple interface. Like lite version. This could also reduce internet trafic without causing so many problems. AI can help mass produce these websites.
The internet should be universal and not just for new devices.
One major problem for old notebooks and netbooks is that current operating systems don't support their graphics sufficiently, and usually this means no hardware acceleration. So you have to use an outdated OS. But then you are very limited in the choice of your webbrowser, too. And these few specialized webbrowser versions for older PCs then don't support all the features needed for currently using the web. It's a chain of sadness :(
And btw: From my countless tries on different systems with many OSses, Linux isn't any better on older hardware than Windows.- actually it's worse, because there are kind of modern tools for older Windows versions. But using an old Linux distributions mostly means being stuck to old software, too.
Not only would I attribute the issue on resource-intensive Javascript code, I'd also attribute the issue on dependence on graphics (e.g. canvases, WebGL) and video that would run much slower without hardware acceleration. I wish there were software implementations that would render web pages not exactly the same, but with significantly less resources. For example, many software 3D graphics didn't have shading nor texture filtering.
their solution is to "buy a new upgrade" instead of optimizing for low-end hardware......I gave up on this a long time ago
I got an old android phone, android 8, 2 gb, 16 gb. the default system + GApps installation takes 80% of the internal memory
Did you consider installing a custom Android version like lienage os or kai os it saved my old Samsung S9 Galaxy
@mistersync100 It's a china registered xiaomi redmi 5a and got region-locked. I did however install shizuku and removed google and MIUI stuff I can safely remove, but it still only about 35% of usable storage
There was once a point in time where web designers were optimizing their code for use on a 56k modem.
The web really became too bloated for its own good right around the time Microsoft labeled windows 7 end of life.
TH-cam has recently switched to an av1 codec for its videos and it will easily tax even some more recent hardware. For example there are some smartphones that are still supported and some that are still being sold that don’t have an av1 decoder built in. This results in a device like that to rely upon the cpu to decode the video which is less efficient and for portable devices usually results in more power being drained from the battery than it all would have just a couple years ago.
My own experience is that TH-cam music will barely work on laptop from 2004 and that is if you have premium to avoid the video ads. The result is an experience that will lag easily if anything else attempts to process at the same time as my laptop is only has single core.
To think that there was once a point in time where TH-cam used flash player to render videos on your browser and could even work on a computer running windows 98 using a version of opera design for windows xp by shoehorning it in using kernelx
In 2002 a work colleague was toying with making web pages. He showed me what he's doing and the stuff was full of bells and whistles. Interesting but it took forever to load. It was 1MB and even when I pointed out that it takes a minute to load he was purposefully blind to that part of user experience. 5, 10 and 20 years of web development later proved him right and confirmed the joke was on me.
That's why I don't touch web development with a 20 feet pole. I don't want to be near anything that has 'j' and 'script' in the same sentence.
Well I understand your situation. A 2013 netbook was optimized for sparing power, since its cooling system can't handle too much.
The incredible thing is that i'm using a 2006 laptop with a 2009 cpu (AMD Turion X2 ZM-85), and is 220% more powerful than yours but has ten times the TDP of your CPU!
If you want to compare CPUs I suggest you cpubenchmark
I use an Inspiron E1505 from 2006 with a Core2Duo T7200 3GB ram. It can browse modern sites but can’t do a whole lot of multitasking.
Old budget machines definitely feel it in the modern world but old high end machines are still super useful, i am using a core2duo E8400 and pretty much any normal task works with windows 10 or 11 and its not slow either.
11 too? Wow, didn't expect
Went from html 3 in netbook era to html 5
Your problem is the AMD A4-1200 dual-core 1GHz. I had similar issues with a Lenovo X131 laptop running the same processor.
What I did was upgrade the motherboard (since I couldn't upgrade the processor on that motherboard) to an Intel i3. I also used a very lightweight linux distro (Catchy OS)...there are several lightweight distros you can try. Lastly, I installed Brave as my browser (with UBlock Origin), along with the enhanced-h264ify extension from the Chrome store (that extension blocks VP8/VP9 codecs on TH-cam, enabling H.264 playback, which is less intensive on your cpu). Max out the ram, add an SSD, and you're ready to go browsing!!
I didn't see any intel options for that motherboard, and it looks like Asus does the proprietary thing, so it's likely ewaste (though you can likely salvage the SSD and memory). My rule of thumb is to get old (not new) Lenovo Thinkpads (perferably business class), you have more options for parts. And stay away from any old Laptops with AMD processors (or Intel Celerons), as those were cheap garbage parts.
I have had to move to 6th Gen Intel mobile, rather than 4th Gen, as some of these sites are just too much. But I can still find these laptops for $200 or less on eBay. I would go newer, but those laptops come with a fixed amount of RAM, soldered on.
Great topic/video,Finally someone has posted this issue for 411 references, The only vid that attempts to address this issue on the WWW! HP G61-320CA, 8 GB DDR2 RAM,870 EVO SSD, only good for 360-480 on YT, 720 buffers/freezes using ethernet connection LOL
I guess it would be useful as an SSH client with a commandline OS. But maybe it can still run remote desktop/VNC?
Up until about 2 years ago I was still using a Core2Duo HP nx9420 laptop i rescued from a skip, maxed out the ram, ssd and highest clock speed cpu it would take and it ran just fine on windows 7. I could watch TH-cam in 1080@60 on about 85/90% cpu usage. Then support ended and i had to use win10. I could only get 720@60 or just normal 1080 but it was on the ragged edge a dropped frames sometimes. It was semi retired to garage use last year until the graphics card (actual removeable card!) gave up.
I think it's a bit of A and a bit of B. The Asus x102B was panned for its slow performance even back when it was released, and from what I remember it was sort of a bottom-of-the-barrel Chromebook competitor back in the day. With that said I do think the internet has become more form over function, with flashy graphics and presentation being more important than writing efficient code. Ads also have to take part of the blame, and personally I run adblockers on all my devices. I also think a lot of website developers only make sites for what they believe is the current day average computer, which in most cases are more than capable of handling sub-optimal coding.
As a bit of a tangent, this was written on my 10 year old Dell Latitude E7240, with an i7-4600U, 8 GB of RAM and a 120 GB SSD, running Debian. It can run all the websites I visit just fine, as long as I don't go overboard and have a million tabs open at the same time.
Install an ad blocker or a browser optomised for blocking all that. Also unsupported windows is never a good idea
I have no issues with unsupported windows and I’ve been using them for years
The only use I have for it is old games and other media played offline.
I guess I just don't expect a good surf on old hardware. Short of a sort of thin client interface to something with more power the physical limitations are significant and there's no real incentive for web content creators to provide a legacy content format. They're pushing the latest. That's where the profit is. As you said old hardware can still be useful for other applications such as a stripped down media player, small personal server or controller especially if it's low power.
This is why Debian and Ublock Origin is your friend. I have an EEE PC given to me by my dad before he passed and on Windows it was a strugglebus but on Debian with XFCE and Ublock Origin on Chromium it is an okay netbook again. Loads web pages just fine, does 720p video with H.264ify with only a couple dropped frames at the start, it is never going to be a speed demon but for looking up something or using it as a YT music jukebox? Still keeps humming along.
I'm so sick of this bloat and we need to get back to basics!
install ssd with dram one, works faster even slow cpu and gpu, increase ram good for you
I use an old Dell Inspiron every now and then. It was designed to run Windows Vista, and Windows 8 was too much for that poor machine. It has Linux Mint XFCE for its OS. I can use that laptop to do most anything right now, and it's great at ripping CDs. TH-cam videos are the bane of its existence. There are times where I have to dial the resolution to the lowest setting to allow it to show anything.
But, that laptop isn't e-waste.
is it necessary to use those kinds of websites?
I watched this video with my Windows XP computer (hardware from around 2014, I made that choice to only install Windows XP to it). For some sites I have Opera 9.64 (seriously), latest Google Chrome it handles, latest Firefox it handles (for email since Chrome made the processing 100% for just the email page existing making everything slower) and for actual internet browsing otherwise, a browser Mypal with of course, an adblock software (well, all browsers have one). Works pretty well, though some sites just suck with all the unnecessary stuff they got.
Also I have a Win 7 computer (laptop), using the latest Chrome and some version Firefox. Firefox makes the whole PC slow to use when the process just exists. Videos and such playback just fine up to 720p60 or so. Would want more RAM to it though, attempts are made and they have failed.
Web sure has gone downhill for the last 15-20 years.
try linux, like alpine or LOC-OS and a light web browser. There's also text only browsers
Let me help you out here. I have an old HP laptop. Notebook 2000. It has an e300 APU dual core1.2 gigahertz. What I did was to install Debian Linux server only. Then by command line installed window manager Open Box. You'll have to search around because it's not going to be easy. With old PCS and today's internet you practically had to customize an install to cut out a lot of the bloat. I installed Brave browser by following the instructions on their website. Then I follow the instructions to set experimental flags to help boost performance within the browser. The initial TH-cam download is slow. But I have bandage to get good video playback. 480p VP9 and 720P AVC utilizing the enhanced YIFY X 265 browser add-on. There's probably a lot more bloat I can't block. My next thing is maybe to try RAMDisk so the cache would go to memory rather than the drive. Which is a spinning rust by the way
The web ≠ the internet.
Big-oh Notation.
would say there things javascript does that my old g series pentium can't really do when loading certain websites. Otherwise I think the bigger issues is simply just windows being windows, and its need to be so heavy is causing issues now for older processors ( and the same could be said for low end modern processors for super cheap sub 100$ laptop which are more or less equal capability) that causes them to be so slow (as well how much stuff on the internet is heavier as it needs to be web app). Wouldn't be surprised if microsoft decided to start dropping support for older cpu instruction sets in a botch attempt to be less heavy and bloat rather than deal with a lot the more real issues with window on older or weaker processors
Why are you waiting for ads? Seriously, this is 2024. Block them! I haven't seen an ad for over 10 years. You also need a 2-way firewall like Simplewall then block everything that doesn't need internet access. Works a treat on Win11 to stop forced updates, just says 'no internet try later' lol