Have you heard of the Old Computer Challenge running from July 10th to July 16th 2023? It is a chance to dig out your really old computers and relive those far gone days. The challenge is to use a computer with 512MB RAM and 1 CPU throttled to it’s lowest frequency.
Read more here: https://dataswamp.org/~solene/2023-06-04-old-computer-challenge-v3.html
So far this is my plan for equipment. I don’t have a really old computer so I will need to throttle some not-so-old equipment.
==Lenovo IdeaPad==
I have a 12 year old IdeaPad with an AMD E1 CPU. I have managed to hobble this device and will run:
To accomplish this you can set the Grub command line value to:
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=“quiet maxcpus=1 mem=512M”
For TLP settings edit /etc/tlp.conf to set these values:
TLP_ENABLE=1
CPU_SCALING_GOVERNOR_ON_AC=powersave
CPU_SCALING_GOVERNOR_ON_BAT=powersave
And there, I now have 777Mhz single core IdeaPad with 512MB RAM!
As a backup plan I also have a Knoppix install. However this is a bit more of a pain since I have to use these options manually at every boot:
knoppix maxcpus=1 mem=512M
Then after booting I need to rate limit the CPU by changing the value of a file like so:
su
echo 777000 | tee /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_max_freq
I will also be running HaikuOS in a VirtualBox virtual machine. I tried running HaikuOS on my IdeaPad but there was no way to limit the CPU frequency, apparently there aren’t power saving drivers to do that with this CPU. But in a VM I can set it to use only 1 CPU then set an execution cap on the CPU. So I will be running:
Will you join us on July 10th?