I have an older PC. It is a HP Presario F500 with AMD Turion 2.0 GHz processor and 1.00 GB RAM. Can I expect this PC to be sufficient to surf through webpages with reasonable response times? (Let’s assume my connection to the “pipeline” is not limiting me, bandwidth and all that jazz.) Is the PC itself “Internet-highway road worthy”?
It’ll be a bit slow on really flash-heavy sites, but still quite usable most of the time. Running Firefox with Adblock and Noscript will help quite a bit by blocking unwanted advertisements and scripts. An extra gig of ram might help, particularly if you’re running Vista or Windows 7.
ETA: A 32-bit operating system really just means you can’t use more than 4 gb of ram. It really isn’t a limit for ordinary web browsing use.
According to Crucial, you can only go to 2 GB anyway.
Yes, you can totally surf the web with that computer.
Geez, my laptop is a 800MHz Celeron with 768MB of memory and surfs just fine. Two other computers I use are in the 1.3-1.8GHz range.
I have no idea where people get the idea that 2GHz computers are inadequate for basic tasks.
If it seems slow, it’s because it’s loaded with crapware. Clean off the excess cruft and kill everything you absolutely don’t need from loading at start up.
It’ll browse the web just fine with Windows. It’d probably be faster with Ubuntu though. It’s worth checking out. It’s very easy to install and use nowadays. Don’t let its Linux-ness scare you; my self-professed computer illiterate dad has been using it for years. 
Note that Netflix and other Silverlight sites wouldn’t work, though.
That’s because, when most people mention a 2.0Ghz computer, they are talking about the Pentium 4. These are too slow for decent web use. Sure, YouTube runs fine, but most other video sites are painfully slow. And Flash games will all run in slow motion.
And, no, it has nothing to do with crapware. This is bare bones Linux or Windows XP. In fact, due to the way Flash is designed, the Linux computer is slower. I know, I had one that I gave to my dad.
Now, that said, the OP is not talking about that 2.0 Ghz computer. He’s talking about Turion, which normally are not referenced by their clock speed, as that doesn’t tell you much. My main computer is only 1.8Ghz, but it’s a 3100+, and thus is more in line with a 3Ghz Pentium. And it’s a little faster than what I consider the bare minimum for web usage: the Atom N270
I would really need more information on the OP’s machine, since finding direct specs is showing me that the F500 is a constantly upgrading line, and nothing mentions one with a Turion at that speed. (They mention a Turion X2, but that’s a dual core processor, and then the OP wouldn’t have any reason to assume it’s too slow for the web.) But a quick look at all the Turions that do run near that speed seems to indicate that they would be about the same speed as my main computer. So, in that case, the answer is a resounding Yes.
Though I do agree that you should upgrade the memory. I am still amazed at the speed increase when I bumped up from 512MB to 1536MB.
On Preview: You can get Silverlight sites to work on Linux.
This is just flat out absurd. Like I said, I surf the usual sites with far less powerful CPUs. If you’re running slow due on an older 2GHz CPU, there’s something else going on that has nothing to do with the CPU.
Like I said, I have a 800MHz Celeron laptop. I play HD videos on it all the time, no problem. For HD Internet videos, the bottleneck is the wireless connection. But once downloaded they run fine.
The computer itself will be fine for web surfing. However, the operating system (I’m assuming Windows) may be all junked up with spyware and toolbars and such. That would require having someone knowledgeable install a fresh copy of Windows and secure it, or install some Linux variant like Puppy Linux.
This. I had a P2 350MHz running on a good broadband cable connection that surfed better than my present 2.2GHz Dual Core running on a shitty DSL.
I’m using a Netop box right now with 1GB, atom processor and with WinXP and it works fine. It was kind of slow with Chrome, but it is much better since I switched to Seamonkey.
I just set up a new Netbook for a friend of mine with Win7 and 1gb and it runs fine even fine even with chrome on 1gb. I was surprised since I thought I would have to upgrade to 2gb.