Modems

[Stephen Coates]

You are right, for alot of things these days, ADSL is better. I like my ADSL because it is easier to use it on a network, and I can download big files quickly. Smaller files, even web pages, I can wait for on dialup though. Maybe I just have more patience than you.

But in the above posts, I was refering to IRC, which only needs a modem to be effective. Yes, you can stay on IRC all day with ADSL, but it WORKS just as good with a modem.

You said that a 19.2K modem was fast enough to use a text based BBS. Would it still be fast enough if you were using the exact same BBS as you were back then? It certainly wouldn't be any slower.

[Harrison]

Saying it works could mean anything. I could run Windows XP on a PC with a 486 processor and it would work, but you couldn't do much with it!

And fast enough is a relative term. At the time when something is the fastest technology it seems fast compared to anything that came before it, but a lot of the time it was far from fast. As with all things you live with what you have at the time.

[Stephen Coates]

I didn;t think XP worked on 486s.

And fast enough is a relative term. At the time when something is the fastest technology it seems fast compared to anything that came before it, but a lot of the time it was far from fast. As with all things you live with what you have at the time.

So your Athlon 64 isn't fast at all then?

[AlexJ]

I didn;t think XP worked on 486s.

You need at least a Pentium to get XP to run. You can however get it to run on an underclocked Pentium running at 8MHz but you can't do anything with it really (so Harrison's point stands).

[Harrison]

I forgot XP is coded to not allow less than a Pentium 1 or less than 64 MB of ram. So just subtitute my 486 example for a Pentium 1 and the argument is the same.

As for the Athlon 64, I have now had this current CPU nearly a year, and it is much faster than anything that came before it, but as with anything you can always do with it being even faster. Some applications I use such as 3D rendering and video editing can always benefit from as much speed as they can get and that will never change. And the newest games currently run fine without any slowdown or problem on it, but once more start to become optimised for dual and quad core it will start to fall behind. Equally the graphics card is more than fast enough at the moment, but once DX10 is employed in more new releases it won't be able to do everything.

As I said, speed and performance are relative to the time they were released.

[Submeg]

Period. "Discussion" finished.

[TiredOfLife]

Speed in a computer is like money.
You can never have enough.

Hated dialup when it was new.
You knew it was slow even then.
You could compare downloading a file to say copying it from a cd to your hd.
Broadband rules.
Boring?
You can read about anything.
Plus there is always pr0n.