Viewing photos on a Pentium 1 Desktop.

[e.271828.p.31415]

Hello everybody!
I have a friend with an old Pentium 1 desktop with windows 95 lying
around. I think that the processor is rated at 90 MHz and the system
has 16 MB of ram.
I was wondering if the computer is still powerful enough to be still
used to view .jpg images. The images do not have to be larger than
800x600 resolution.
I also have no idea about what graphics card the system has, but I
think that it definatley has 2 MB of onboard memory.
Otherwise I do not know anything else about the specs, and I would not
be able to provide additional information.
I was thinking of trying to get it to work with ACDSee 3.0. I tested
the program on my Windows XP machine, and it used about 10-12 MB of
ram when viewing .jpg's of these resolutions.
What are your thoughts on this? Can it be done?

Also I was wondering how many colors does Windows 95 support? Can it
go to 32-bit?

P.S. the computer was purchased around the year 1995, if this helps.

Any comments would be greatly appreciated!

 

[Paul]

Hello everybody!
I have a friend with an old Pentium 1 desktop with windows 95 lying
around. I think that the processor is rated at 90 MHz and the system
has 16 MB of ram.
I was wondering if the computer is still powerful enough to be still
used to view .jpg images. The images do not have to be larger than
800x600 resolution.
I also have no idea about what graphics card the system has, but I
think that it definatley has 2 MB of onboard memory.
Otherwise I do not know anything else about the specs, and I would not
be able to provide additional information.
I was thinking of trying to get it to work with ACDSee 3.0. I tested
the program on my Windows XP machine, and it used about 10-12 MB of
ram when viewing .jpg's of these resolutions.
What are your thoughts on this? Can it be done?

Also I was wondering how many colors does Windows 95 support? Can it
go to 32-bit?

P.S. the computer was purchased around the year 1995, if this helps.

Any comments would be greatly appreciated!

Various viewing applications are listed here. An "OS Support"
chart is at the bottom of the page.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_image_viewers

The second part of the FAQ here has some viewer suggestions.

http://www.faqs.org/faqs/jpeg-faq/part1/
http://www.faqs.org/faqs/jpeg-faq/part2/

At least some programs will be using the free JPEG library from here.
They even include source download for the library. There is a note
in their structure.doc, for example. Many of the UNIX viewers I
compiled in the past, would use this library.

http://www.ijg.org/

"*** Portability issues ***

Portability is an essential requirement for the library. The
key portability issues that show up at the level of system architecture are:

1. Memory usage. We want the code to be able to run on PC-class machines
with limited memory. Images should therefore be processed sequentially (in
strips), to avoid holding the whole image in memory at once. Where a
full-image buffer is necessary, we should be able to use either virtual memory
or temporary files."

Which tells you that, given an incentive, a program won't need much more
in resources, than a decent frame buffer for the graphics. The video
card determines how nice the pictures look, in the sense that a 24 bit
color card is going to look nicer than a "quantized to 8 bit" view.

If the machine is dog-slow, you might send pictures to the recipient
in progressive JPEG format. Maybe they'll see something on the screen
first, while the decompression operation is being completed ?

Paul