Many computers from the 2000s can't really stream HD video

I recently installed 32-bit Devuan onto an old Dell Optiplex 755 from 2008 because I needed to use a computer with a parallel port to pull old family photos from an Iomega Zip 100 disc. Just for fun, I decided to try streaming a recently-uploaded video from YouTube… and the computer could not handle it! Like, we're talking single-digit FPS (in a stuttery way). And while not being able to stream video seems wild to us today, this actually makes a lot of sense: This computer's CPU is a Core 2 Duo: Intel's first major move away from single-core CPUs. At the time it came out (July 2006), few people had Internet capable of streaming HD (720p) video (Yes, 720p is HD.), very few people even owned HD videos (DVDs are 480p!), very few HD videos existed just in general (Phones recorded at 240p if they recorded at all, and some people were still recording to VHS (also 240p)!), and YouTube was something most people were only just hearing about for the first time ("Numa Numa" was literally on local news and we were like "Wow, that's fun, you can watch videos online?".). So of course the Core 2 Duo's iGPU can't handle it: it never needed to!

And it's more than just resolution causing this slowdown: modernized streaming sites (like YouTube) use codecs that straight-up didn't exist in 2006 (or 2008). Modern GPUs (iGPUs included) have special wiring to accelerate these codecs, but naturally, the Core 2 Duo completely lacks that wiring, meaning all the decoding has to be emulated, and so even SD (480p) video (which was ubiquitous back then) can be stuttery to stream (though some of it is okay!). When I pop in a DVD (also 480p), though, playback is quite smooth!

Side-note: The whole OS is honestly quite smooth in general. I've "only" got 4GBs of RAM (This was quite good at the time!) and my OS is on a single 7200RPM consumer-grade HDD, and I would describe the system as shockingly snappy. Like, this is absolutely useable for anything you'd want to do on a computer nowadays besides video streaming (Audio streaming works fine!) and gaming (Even Flash games configured to low-quality are slow — I'm guessing this is because all Flash is emulated nowadays; I know from experience that this CPU had no problem playing the same Flash games from the same websites back in the day.). (Actually, side-note on Flash: YouTube used to use it to play videos! Crazy, right?)

So I guess if you don't want your kids (or yourself) to spend all day watching brainrot, get them/you a PC with a Core 2 Duo, lol. You, too, can help reduce E-waste!

(You'll need to buy a $30 Wi-Fi card to use Wi-Fi. And if you get a $50 GPU off eBay to enable video streaming / retro gaming (I didn't.), then you'll probably need to get a PCI Wi-Fi card. The Optiplex 755, specifically, has a grand total of two low-profile slots: one PCIe 1.0 x16, and one old-school PCI slot. I actually do have an old PCI Wi-Fi card lying around (from Linksys), but it's so old that it pre-dates WPA2 (!!!), meaning it can't be used with modern Wi-Fi networks unless they're unencrypted (WEP/WPA1, which it does support, are insecure.).)

UPDATES: This computer handles Old School RuneScape beautifully (48fps when run with the same not-rescaled view it had in 2006), but somehow chokes badly on SuperTux, which is really weird because it's a platformer from 2003 in the style of Super Mario Brothers. Idk what the devs did to that game between 2003 and 2025, but there's absolutely no reason this game should be unplayable at native resolution, especially when OSRS (which is 3D!) runs great. The computer can also mostly run a game I had on this old CD from 1995, but some features are a bit broken. That's WINE for you, I suppose.