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I recall a friend having a pentium 1 at 100mhz and could only play 64-128 kbps mp3's if he did literally nothing else. The song would skip from time to time and would immediately start skipping if you moved the mouse. From what I remember this was with winamp.

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My first machine was a 100mhz Pentium; Winamp used about 25% CPU to play MP3s - I did it all the time while coding and hanging out on IRC. Can't think why your friend's machine would struggle with the same setup. Maybe older versions of Winamp were underoptimized.

I used Sonique for a while because it looked amazing - slightly poorer performance, but felt worth it. Later on, Sonique "optimized" for later Pentium releases and it became much too slow on the P100, so I switched back to Winamp.

Also, it still boots. :)

He was lucky he had a legit pentium, I had one of those cyrix CPUS that claimed pentium speeds, except the floating point unit was rubbish.

The only way to play mp3s was in linux where I shutdown every possible daemon and ran the decoder at the highest priority.

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