I decided to join the Old Computer Challenge using a Thinkpad R51e. Below, you can see a screen print and information from neofetch.

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As you can see above, it exceeds the original requirements. It matches on everything except for memory. In the print I had reduced the memory to 1G, but doing that caused the CPU Temperature to peg at 80C (175F) when doing minor activities. So I chickened out and re-added the 1G to bring it back to 2G.

So yes, I "cheated" a bit, but being card carrying wimp I had no guilt. Actually it was not really cheating since I was using a system built around 2005. Maybe with more time I can come up with more rationalizations :)

I never used the R51e for such a long period of time, but I do use it every once in a great while for nostalgia and to backup important files. A friend gave it to me a few years ago. She moved to a MAC and it was sitting idle for quite a while. If you look at it, you would think it was brand new, she really took good care if it.

Findings

• Hardware Items
  • I really really like the 4:3 resolution.
  • Sleep works in a way, but about 80% of the time my X display gets corrupted on resume. So, I need to power off when done for the day.
  • Battery, maybe 10 to 15 minutes, so more like a cheap UPS instead of a real Laptop Battery. Eventually I may see if I can find a better one.
  • For the Tin Foil Hat Crowd, there is no Intel ME and no TPM on this system -- yeah :)
  • As noted above, I needed to use 2G memory (its max) due to CPU Temperature. I did not want it to catch fire :)
  • The largest issue is wireless. When not working I can use an ethernet cable, but at Work (home), were my pandemic office is, I need to use wireless. Wireless is very flaky (more on that below).
    • Update: In 2022 I bought a Edimax Wi-Fi 4 802.11n Adapter (amazon), this solved my wireless issue and works great with the Thinkpad R51e.
  • When I power up, I need to wait a bit to allow OpenBSD to re-link the kernel. I noticed once in a great while, I would get a panic when logging into xenodm(1). I have not seen this occur since I started waiting for ld(1) to complete.
  • A bit cramped on disk space. I needed to be careful when downloading any large files.

• The WEB
  • Firefox is a no-go
  • In spite of what I just said directly above, I needed to start Firefox to upload this page to my site. The provider uses cPanel, so I made a brave attempt. After multiple tries and a few Firefox core dumps, I gave up and uploaded using my Daily Driver.
    So far, this is the only issue I ran across without a work-around.
  • Discovered dillo is great for testing changes made to my WEB Pages on my local system.
  • dillo works fine, but has issues with some images and some WEB pages.
  • An IRC User also in this challenge (#old-computer-challenge) pointed me to links+. Links allowed me to view WEB pages dillo could not handle.
  • Accessing on-line services like Amazon, ebay and banks is a "fail". But personally, I hardly ever use those sites. Just once per month I download a bank statement. So in reality, for the sites I care about, I am fine.
  • There are some sites I would visit that failed on this system. So during this challenge I just did without, and I did not suffer any withdrawals :)

• Other Items
  • mutt - via IMAPS for gmail and personal email
  • tin - for usenet
  • irssi - for IRC
  • gvim - works great, but syntax highlighting can slow it down in very rare cases
  • Emacs - no issues
  • Various games - nethack (hardfought), tetris (part of OpenBSD base) and a few other simple ones, all work fine.
  • Music streaming - Creative BT-W2 works great with the R51e, better than Bluetooth I have used under some Linux distros.
  • Testing programs and scripts for work. These are command line only items for back-end processing, I never learned GUI toolkits. I found OpenBSD can catch memory issues by default. To do that on other Operating Systems, I would need to install a special package(s), which I am really to lazy to setup. On the R51e, no issues except for speed, which is not really a bid deal.

Wireless -- During the competition, I could not connect the R51e directly to the ISP provided Modem, it seems to have something that prevents old wireless chips from connecting. But I did connect an old router to the ISP's modem via a cable then connect to the old router. That worked in a fasion, but I experienced lots of network drops. In 2022, I ended up getting a Edimax Wi-Fi 4 802.11n Adapter (amazon) and this dongle solved the wireless issues.

Links about the Challenge

• Old Computer Challenge Information about the Challenge

• KuchiKuu Page Inspired me to create this page

Comics I need to see everyday plus the only Music Stream I use from a Computer. Without these sites, I would have had to bail :)

• comic xkcd fine with dillo

• daily comic Sherman's Lagoon

• daily comic BC fine with dillo

• daily comic Heathcliff fine with dillo

• daily comic Frank and Ernest fine with dillo

• daily comic Bloom County fine with dillo

• Echos of Blue Mars -- is my favorite music stream site, this is the stream link for mplayer and audacious. mplayer works great in text mode on the R51e.

So far, this is working fine, I do notice a moderate speed difference when compared to my usual daily system. But all in all, for me, this is still a usable system.

Contact

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