Not just how it physically looks but, y'know, the vibes.
Athlon XP for me, easy.
the atom processors produced the BIGGEST variety of devices in the history of the personal computer platform. the like 2007-2011 era was populated with gobs of second- and third-gen netbooks, but also just bizarre little Gadgets that happened to run windows and linux (and in many cases, macos via hackintosh.) You could get palmtops with tiny thumb keyboards and smart barcode scanners and weird cop car tablets with strange docks. all kinds of wacky shit that ONLY existed because the atom made x86 easy to put in a package of any imaginable size and shape, and delivered almost as much battery life as arm platforms. and the performance was like... bad, yes, but like celeron bad. non-ideal, but completely reasonable if you weren't being deliberately obtuse about your expectations. the atom was the crowning achievement of mids. we stan a regular guy.
I think Atom in these weird devices was fine, as that was the point: An x86 chip that could sip power to meet the minimal specifications of a bunch of wild and whacky portable and low profile devices.
But it most certainly was worse than Celeron in mainstream machines. I just think back to how I had an e-Machine desktop with an Atom processor inside. A desktop. And it ran Vista. 64-bit Vista.1 Which was strange in so many ways, as similar makes of the same machine came with either Pentiums or Celerons, and 32-bit Windows. But this thing, for only God & Acer know why, was configured the way it was.2
And it was miserable. So agonizingly miserable it made me wish for a celeron as a teen. Doing anything on that computer, even simple web browsing, was a chore. You could really tell this was a machine where everything went wrong. It was unusable (but, it was all I had.)
And netbooks. These were better, at least, as long as they ran XP. But anything higher was nigh unusable for any length. The only thing you would be doing on those would be web browsing, or writing in Word. They were basically glorified PDAs, only they ran full desktop Word and Internet Explorer or Google Chrome; and had a keyboard that was a genuine attempt at a keyboard, instead of some handheld affair; with a screen you could at least watch videos on, or read documents without having to scroll every 5 sentences.
Atom powered a lot of things. It allowed for a lot of cool and interesting things!
But lets not forget it came out during a race to the bottom in both laptop and desktop computing, at a time when Windows' system requirements were only increasing, having been artificially been lowered just to make OEMs happy with one of the most notorious product releases in Microsoft history behind Windows ME.
-
I know it ran 64-bit Windows because it had "Internet Explorer (64-bit)" in the start menu, which was the first I'd ever heard of "64-bit" on a PC.
-
I think it was one of those in-store only models that get tweaked for the likes of Walmart & Best Buy in the US. Something that's impossible to find the exact make and model of now, and any results for similar machines will just show what it was intended to have if you bought it from the manufacturer.
👍
