Somehow my head hurts more reading this than when it was stuffed in the old thread.
Anyway. On discussions of microarchitecture. If we had some kind of cheesy film plot thread where we were stuck with a beowulf cluster of those machines or those of the same vintage, and somehow needed a distributed/parallel supercomputer type performance out of them whilst wringing every drop of performance from a standard OS (or standard OS with a bit of registry, or equivalent, fiddling), all while having to fend off basic fire and forget type malware attacks then sure.
This ain't that though.
We had one guy, running one laptop, presumably from behind a standard home, with a general knowledge of IT and best practices thereof. Reasons for it might vary from just for fun, because my old games run (DOS-XP was not bad, or can be made to work, DOS-vista and beyond is more tricky), run better or run acceptably whilst also doing the old shit as well, to use with a legacy printer/plotter/cctv camera...
I agree it would not do for a banking computer, or be made seriously secure whilst also being online in a non whitelist fashion.
Back to performance they were all still contemporaries as well -- in some regards the performance of a top tier p4 in various single core tests (which is still a lot of programs, never mind legacy stuff) will beat out more than just the lowest of low and underclocked things in the core i[number] regime. This is not that though and things were still close enough that the chosen optimisation of MS' compiler is not going to make a lot of odds when the rubber meets the proverbial road and you are going to need complicated measuring setups to even see it.
For the basic business or grandparent case. The end of contemporary browsers a while back did hurt a little bit, as did certain anti viruses ending support after a fashion. Anecdotally I kept several running well past the end of XP, and had no real troubles. Eventually the desire to do more and more overtook the hardware, at which point nice refurb machines with comparatively blistering performance were often in the sub few hours of my time range, and most things other than legacy fancy printers had all become online services.
Some seemed to view it as tantamount to some kind of virtual equivalent of following all the chemistry fun and games stuff from my old books (if you have mice you can paint your seeds in red lead don't you know, should your pet have fleas then DDT is good stuff to dust in their fur (though you might want to prevent them from licking themselves, lest they get sick), and if you have a hankerchief loaded with mercury in your pocket you can make certain old UK coins appear more valuable than they actually are at a glance). I know we all have different approaches to safety and security but I can't see how to get to the virtual equivalents of near calling for the people in hazmat suits and forced evacuations.
