2024-08-02

As usual, I have enjoyed reading everyone's Old Computer Challenge
phlogs here on SDF. I still did not participate due to a lack of
an old computer that would have provided an actual challenge. A
few years ago I was infected by minimalism as everyone seemed to
be and I got rid of a lot of old computer hardware including my
Asus netbook, a few G4 PowerMacs, and some old 32-bit Atom nettops.

But even then, I don't think the netbook or Atom nettops would have
been much of a challenge. My strategy would have been to install
AntiX and if it couldn't handle that, install netbsd.

One question has to be answered for all of these challenges, when
does a computer really become old and challenging to use? I'm
writing this post on my primary driver computer which is a laptop
from 2011. It is now 2024 and aside from gaming, there isn't a
single thing that I need to do on my 2011 laptop that I can't
actually do...on a 13 year old computer. Putting that in perspective,
when my laptop was new, a 13 year old laptop would have been from
1998 and that'd be extremely difficult to use as a daily driver in
2011.

But to answer my own question, any computer that is unable to run
a modern browser to render and play youtube is what I would consider
old and quite challenging to use day-to-day. The horsepower needed
to run a modern browser and render youtube to play webm or mp4
files is by today's standard, modest. rasberry PI single board
computers do that with ease.

So any computer that CAN'T do that would be pretty challenging in
my opinion. Youtube is a great proxy for the modern javascript
heavy web.

with the youtube requirement in place, what would be the most modern
hardware that couldn't meet that challenge? Certainly, I know that
G4 PowerMacs aren't able to do that. But I'm probably guessing that
G5 PowerMac's can't meet that standard either.

Do netburst-era Pentium 4 chips have the juice to run firefox and
youtube? It's been many years since I've owned a Pentium 4 system.
maybe something to try next year.

The trick is to totally max out your old hardware as much as you
can to make it competitive. The 5,1 Intel Mac Pro fans are masters
at this.  They've been nursing and upgrading those machines for
more than a decade and I think it's really only now in the 4k video
editing era that those machines are finally starting to see their
limits. When elementary school kids are editing 4k videos for
classes, you know your hardware is getting old.

Of course if you are like me, then those intel Mac Pros still have
a ton of life left...afterall, we're using computers to read gopher
and browse SDF.

Honestly, I'm not sure when my 2011 daily driver will need to be
replaced. It still has the horsepower to run youtube and firefox
afterall. As long as that's true, I don't need to upgrade at all.

Anyways, congrats to everyone that completed the Old Computer
challenge. It's awesome to read what people have had to do.