Lately I’ve been using some old PCs. Pentium 3 and 4 based machines with 256 MB of RAM running Windows XP. They’re not as slow as you’d think: Word and Excel run fine. Even PowerPoint is snappy enough.

What really, really, hobbles these boxes isn’t bloatware like Office, it’s Web 2.0 applications. Using Firefox or Internet Explorer, sites like Gmail and MobileMe grind the computer to a halt. That’s not all…any site utilizing JavaScript makes surfing the web a slow, painful process.

Years ago the IT industry was touting the Internet Appliance which was a low-powered computer using a web browser as the conduit to running web-based software. Those devices in their desktop format didn’t take off and I’m not sure they would have survived based on my observations of the WWW on a Pentium 3 and 4 computer.

Over the years we have blamed Microsoft Office for driving up the speed and memory requirements of a personal computer. When Office 2003 runs acceptably on a 600 MHz Pentium 3 and Gmail does not, it’s time to start questioning the computing resources required to surf the web.

JavaScript may be the culprit and there’s no getting away from it with today’s web.

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