Single core, 32 bit CPU, can't even do video playback on VLC. But it kinda works for some offline work, like text editing, and even emulation through zsnes! It's crazy how Linux keeps old hardware like this running.
Thankfully though, this laptop CPU is upgradable, and so is the ram, so I'm planning on revitalizing and bringing this old Itautec to the 21st century 😄
I was trying to think of the oldest hardware I have run modern Linux on (probably an old Pentium II) when I remembered that I used to run SLS on a 486 (33 MHz, 4 MB of RAM).
Probably the slowest I've used was a 25 MHz(?) sparcstation 1, 500 MB drive, 16 MB RAM. Or some 90's arm box. Netwinder? iPAQ?
It's kind of terrible how huge even tiny distributions are these days. But these days there's cheap low power draw hardware and big storage available that works great and that's nice. I don't miss the bad old times.
I'm sure it can. My guess: either VLC is broken and a different or lighter player would work, or OP is picking the wrong videos (for a really slow CPU, you want older/less compressed codecs—I bet it would do MPEG1 just fine, and might even have acceleration for it).