Compaq Professional AP200

I bought these desktop from The boxshop in MN, I have a hobby of giving old used PCs a new lease on life and I found the 1 star review sadly lacking in computer knowledge. The PC is old and is far from cutting edge now, and at the time, the mobo dates back to 1998 so expecting 2007 performance is not what one should be hoping for with this Workstation. Compared to Compaq's current parent company; HP, their dual processor Workstations (Kayak) I also bought used... Those are more built around Pentium II support with Intel North and Southbridge were recently heralded by non other then Maximum PC in it's documenting the evolution of Computer technology, and it was nice to know I had the pleasure of using some of the landmark tech. I had an Apple ][ only for many years but fell out of favor with the Mac becoming the only Apple product in the 90s.
My first computer was in 2000. I used 64MB of Ram and Celeron CPU at 700Mhz. Later, I had a BIOS setting giving me a 500Mhz from a higher native CPU, but discovered that at 500Mhz, MPEG2 video plays with only minor hiccups. Most compressed video will work fine as well as DVD burning and certainly CD burning.
Complaints of slowness would be attributed to bad disc organization. The less files on your HDD, the less options running on the OS, the faster any system will run. These Workstations main attribute is SCSI support. There are three SDRAM expansion slots but a max mem seems just short of 1GB. Still, with no Tualatin Pentium or Celeron support, the Celerons work well via a SlotKit support board. I tested a Tualatin at 1Ghz and the computer powered up and appeared to run but with no video and the power button shut operation off... This means it had 'hung'. No damage is incurred with bus speeds set correctly. The AGP won't support 4x graphics speed so a minimal 3D option is the biggest setback but can still be exploited with many earlier games. 32MB is good for alot of older games, however 64 and 128MB video ram are more common for 3D games. Photo editing in digital is one of the key uses for older PCs I feel and almost a requirement to have a worthy setup for software and online access.
BILL