Hello and welcome to the Old Computer Challenge - 2025 Edition! This is the second year when I’m participating, and if you didn’t see my previous year’s entry, you can check the OCC24 - Party like it’s 2004 article, although it’s not mandatory.

Since last year, I was fairly active on the #oldcomputerchallenge channel on IRC (on Libera.Chat), as I’ve found there some really nice people, some with really nice hobbies and very nice interesting websites!

The theme this year is “There is no challenge”, and while I love an open challenge, sometimes a small theme direction could have been useful. But as the main challenge says “there is no challenge. It is but a learning experience”, I hope to learn something during the time using this computer. The challenge starts on Sunday, July 13th, and ends on Saturday, July 19th, but it might prolong itself.

Because the last year’s article felt neat and tidy, I’m going to use most of the markdown and structure of last year, so if you see incomplete things, well, get used to it. :D

Day 0 Hardware & Setup^

So without further ado, here I present you the computer I’m going to use for this year’s OCC, the 12" Aluminium PowerBook G4, from 2004. I’ve written a bit about it when I got it, when it just wouldn’t turn on, but a few days ago, I just connected the charger on it, pressed the power button and it just started!

It’s got the 1.33GHz G4 processor, 1.25GB of RAM and a 100GB HDD (which reports to be 93GB), with about 40 gigs free. These are not hugely overpowered specs, but they should actually be more than enough for the things I have planned for the upcoming week. The graphics card is a sturdy 64MB GeForce FX Go5200 (weird to think that now we use 16-24GIGABYTES video cards), so many games from the mid-2000s should work without issues, especially since the screen’s resolution is 1024x768. More about this laptop can be found on the Apple site back in 2004 or you can look for the spec sheet of the entire line

While I’m writing these words, I’m also copying some music to the hard drive and it will be the only music I will listen to over this week. And since we’re talking music, I will pair this year’s OCC with a period-appropriate iPod, and while I could use an U2 4th generation iPod, I thought to keep it Aluminium for the sake of Jony Ive, and chose a First Generation iPod mini, released in 2004 too. Well, either that, or the Second Generation, because that pink looks nice.

Upsides and downsides

As far as I can tell, there are no obvious issues with the unit (now that it starts), except for the battery that is drained and impossible to find online. Maybe I’ll find someone good with the soldering iron, so I can change the cells inside the battery. The minor annoyances are the fact that the keyboard is not backlit, but I guess we’re just used to have this feature present on modern computers. Scrolling with two fingers on the trackpad seems to be very responsive, as it’s now at the minimum, and it still scrolls pretty fast in TextWrangler and the browser, but I’ll get used to it. I fixed the scrolling as it was weirdly configured in iScroll 2.

Another (minor) annoyance is the fact that this laptop is so compact, it’s horrible to service, and upgrading the HDD to an SSD would be a huge undertaking which I’m not sure if I can finish properly. I’m leaving a link towards a iFixit guide, to see how complicated it is.

On the plus side, the trackpad works fine, the speakers sound really well, wireless connects and while not super fast (connected at 54Mbps), it’s an internet connection and that’s more than enough. The keyboard is a bit on the soft side, but it’s very quiet and gives a great typing experience, I understand why some people are still using older computers as distraction-free writing environments, it’s because it’s super easy to do so. The screen is decent, 1024x768 was the standard resolution back then (desktops usually used 1280x1024), but having this resolution on a fairly small screen (12") results in a decent PPI, the screen looking awesome. The speakers are nothing to write home by modern standards, but still offer a good listening experience while doing something else (I’m listening the Need for Speed Underground sountrack as we speak, and it sounds like it did when the game came out). I/O is plenty, with a modem, LAN, Firewire 400, two USB, mini-DVI, line in and headphones out, while also having an optical drive (CD-RW only, not a DVD combo), so connecting devices should be a breeze.

Mac OSX and Software

The PowerBook is running Mac OSX Leopard and I was thinking that maybe I could make some software updates to this, but Max OSX 10.5.8 is the last version available and I already have that installed. Also the other software seems to be up to date, including Safari 5.0.6 and iTunes 10.6.3 (among others). For browsing the web, I’m going to use TenFourFox Feature Parity Release 32 (SPR 4) (a fork of Firefox) which allows me to browse the web with a lot of modern features, which is great for research and searching stuff during this week. For IRC I’ll use Colloquy which supports connections to libera.chat, and it has all the features I need.

EL PLAN

Circling back at the end of the prep day, what is the purpose of this? Well, since the challenge said no particular challenge, I’ll try to just tick some simple, but nice checkpoints along this week, while having fun using this great little computer:

  • Play 5 games I already played
  • Play 5 games I heard about but never played
  • Play 3 games I’ve never heard about
  • Listen to some music
  • Watch a movie
  • Watch some old TV shows and cartoons
  • Code something within the scope of the project (Old Coding Challenge ?)
  • Code something fairly modern (Maybe something for my website? Or maybe some nice stand alone project)
  • Write some fiction during each day (longer or shorter)
  • Do some creative work (photo editing? video editing?)
  • Burn a music CD to use in my niece’s car
  • Most of all, HAVE FUN!
  • Stretch goal: make some hardware upgrades

Stay close and keep checking this article starting with Sunday evening!