It's fun to blow the dust off computers of the 80s and 90s and show they still can function. But what if you had to actually work on one of these relics?

YouTube channel OldTech81 took on this retro challenge. After viewers requested he use a 1990s version of Windows as his operating system for a day, he did them one better. In this video, he uses Windows 98 on an era-appropriate computer: A Compaq Armada E500.

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The 17-year-old dinosaur in question contains 128 MB of RAM and "a whopping 12 GB hard drive." It does a little better in this test than you might expect. Windows 98 works with USB, so he can use his external mouse. Old versions of Microsoft Office more or less work. The Compaq can play music and multitask.

But when our guide tries to use the websites and web services where most of us spend our time in 2017, things go downhill. The newest browser that works with Windows 98 is Internet Explorer 6, which proves to be almost incompatible with the modern web.

Using a kernel trick that allows him to access more modern software, he gets Opera 11 from around the year 2010 on this machine. That lets him access today's websites, but big sites like Facebook, Gmail, and YouTube simply overwhelm the poor Compaq. It hasn't got the RAM to pull up a Facebook page in less than 10 minutes and won't even finish loading Gmail.

Can you use Windows 98 two decades later? You can. But you won't be happy.

Source: Digg

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