Old Computer Challenge 2025 — My journey so far

2025-07-16 | ⏱️ 3 min read

This is my story of «somewhat participation» in Old Computer Challenge created by Solene Rapenne in 2021. In my own way. I couldn't keep up with daily reports and engaging with community, so this is a bulk report after the fact.

The idea of a challenge is to use some old hardware, software or technology to find out what you can do with it nowadays. Practice shows that there are a lot of things you can do. Just look at the initiatives like EndOf10 that incentivize people to use free and open source operating systems instead of throwing away perfectly fine hardware just because Microsoft said so.

This year Old Computer Challenge is «There is no challenge». So you're basically free to use whatever you have or want.

What I got

For this challenge I decided to dig up and repair my first PC. It wasn't a monster machine even in 2003, but it served me well for almost ten years. Here are the specs:

CPU: AMD Ahtlon XP 2000+ (1.6 Ghz, single-core, i386, Anno Domini 2002)
RAM: 640 Mb of DDR2
HDD: Some old 80 Gb Western Digital drive from ~2004

Some capacitors on the motherboard, of course, gloriously went to Valhalla some time ago, but all in all it was a perfectly fine machine if only a little dusty.

I tested several OSes on it, including those that I owned but never had a chance to test: Suse 10.1, Mandriva 2006, ASPLinux 10. But in the end I decided to test OpenBSD. And because we are in the world of Normal Operating Systems, I used the latest release, OpenBSD 7.7.

First challenge: how do we boot?

Well, that's not a simple question. This PC has USB ports, but BIOS doesn't know how to boot from them. The only available options were CDROM and floppy drive.

Thankfully, there is such a great tool as Plop Boot Manager. It does one simple thing: you put it on a floppy drive or CD/DVD, boot from it and then choose what do you want to boot next (HDD, USB, etc.) And it's only 500 Kb!

OpenBSD 7.7 on a 23-year old machine

This might sound ridiculous, but the most recent OpenBSD works just fine on a 23-year old machine. Right after installation without any tinkering and tuning it boots in 88 seconds up to xenodm. I think that's great. The mere fact that the most recent and complete modern OS just easily boots on an almost quarter of a century old hardware deserves a shout out in praise of OpenBSD developers. Most modern Linux distributions do not even provide 32-bit installation options.

Sadly, after some use it turned out that most of my RAM is ridden with bad blocks that caused hard crashes. I pulled RAM out leaving only 256 Mb.

And you know what? OpenBSD still worked just fine.

It doesn't care. It just works.

There is no challenge

Funny thing is, I didn't even needed to delve into this technonecromancy because I do Old Computer Challenge every day for many years.

My own machine that I use every day for all my work (i.e. it basically pays my bills) qualifies for an OCC, because it's a 2011 machine with a pretty good 3rd generation i7 CPU from 2012 and some 8 Gb of DDR3 RAM. All PCI-E ports are fried, so I can't even use a dedicated GPU, getting by with CPU videocore. And I'm fully content with it. It does everything I need.

It's not that I don't have money to build some new and modern machine. Actually I did some time ago, but just gave it away to someone who needed it more. It's just... this one works fine, why do I need more?

There is no challenge.

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