>  Hi Gents/Ladies
>
> Can someone on this list please tell me what the Beginning Specs for a
> Pentium 2 pc is?   Is a Pentium MMX with a 166Mhz cpu considered a
> P2??  Also it only has 32Kb of ram.
>
> All info would be greatly appreciated.
>
> Regards,
> Wolfgang Rohloff
> Cape Town,
> South Africa.

  The Pentium II was a whole new generation of chip.  It incorporated the
MMX feature that had been introduced in later Pentiums, but also included
the L2 cache inside the processor module.  I think the first Pentium IIs ran
at about 233 MHz, and they later reached at least 400 MHz.
  Actually, between the "Pentium" and "Pentium II" was the "Pentium Pro",
which only ever really was sold as a server chip.  Some performance defects
in the Pentium Pro were fixed in the Pentium II.

  Bottom line:  You have a "Pentium with MMX".  It's not a Pentium II.

  I recently donated a Pentium-class machine, about 200 MHz with 64MB of
RAM, to a friend who needed to be able to browse simple web sites and send
and receive email.  There's useful life in that class yet.  But I would not
try to use that machine for modern games or demanding applications; if
you're looking at something that lists "Pentium II" in its system
requirements, then even if you can get it to run on your existing system,
you're unlikely to be very happy with it.

David Gillett

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