The Old Computer Challenge

What?

There's a fun little challenge that runs every year, where you use an old computer (or make your modern one slow as hell) for a week. I think it's neat, so I'm doing it. For 2023, it starts on July 10th.

Learn more about the OCC from their official site

My attempts by year

2023

Setup

Partially documenting this for my own sake, but partially for anyone else with a similar setup who is confused how to do things. Can't promise this'll work for you, but it worked for me :)

To limit your RAM and CPU, there are two methods I know worked for me.

> If you followed someone elses guide and couldn't get the CPU to only use one core- try doing maxcpus=1 instead of maxcores=1. I don't know if that's just outright wrong, or only works for some distros, but I'm pointing it out because it stumped me.

The temporary way

1. Turn off your computer, and get into grub. For my machine, that's holding Shift while it turns on.

2. When you get to grub, press e. This will take you to some scary looking code.

3. Edit the line starting with "linux", and add `mem=512M maxcpus=1` to the end.

i. Optionally remove `quiet splash` from that line as well. That makes sure that if something breaks, it'll tell you on screen (likely that you don't have enough RAM to boot)

4. Press ctrl+X to boot using the settings you picked. You'll need to do all of these steps every time you want to turn on your computer, because otherwise when you restart your computer, it'll boot like normal (good if you break something!)

The less temporary way

1. Use your editor of choice to open `/etc/default/grub` as sudo. e.g. `sudo vim /etc/default/grub`

2. Look for the line `GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX=""`, and change it to be:

3. Save and quit however your editor of choice does that.

4. Run this command in your terminal to apply your changes: `sudo update-grub`

5. When you restart your computer, it'll use these settings every time. To change back to normal, just do these steps again, but removing what you added the first time.

Other steps

To force your CPU to run as slow as it can, run cpufreq-info and take note of what it says the hardware limits are. For mine, it says 400MHz - 3.5 GHz.

Then, run the following:

Adjust that number based on your own system. If it doesn't always stick to that maximum, you might be having the same issue I was having. If cpufreq-info says your driver is intel_pstate, add `intel_pstate=disable` in the same place you set cpu/ram limits. Then when you boot in, run:

to limit it. (this might actually be a better command than the first one I mentioned, I don't know computers, I just know following instructions. Thanks to solene for explaining it to me on IRC)

(TODO: better instructions)

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