# Low power computing 

If you have been reading along with my adventures lately, you will be
aware that I had been upgrading one of my old ATX machines[1] to be
my new daily driver and things hadn't been going too well. Having
gotten the machine to a useable state I put it on the power meter to
find it was drawing 68w at idle, which jumped to around 100w when
scrolling around in firefox-esr. 

I really wanted this machine to be my forever system that I would
simply upgrade and repair as time went by, but 68w ticking over is
quite a lot. The HP microserver comparatively was 56w. Could I save
10w by removing the spinning rust and raid card? Possibly...


## Mighty Atom

I can't remember the exact motivation for my next move but I had an
old asus eeebox b202 which had previously been my mom's. After she
had finished with it I had installed FreeBSD and used it for about 8
months, after upgrading the memory in it to 2Gb. From memory it
wasn't exactly fast, as you'd expect from a 1.6ghz Intel Atom, but it
was perfectly usable. I had earlier in the day checked the specs and
had noted the maximum video output was 1600x1200, which was a bit of
a disappointment as I have a nice 1920x1200 24" monitor. Undeterred I
fetched it from its resting place, connected it to my monitor &
keyboard and fired it up. 

It booted into FreeBSD and to my amazement it was at 1920x1200 when I
checked xrandr. After a futile attempt to update FreeBSD (no idea why
I even tried) I made an i386 miniroot USB stick to install OpenBSD. I
have done this quite a few times recently so it didn't take long,
especially now my all my dotfiles are in a git repo and easily
deployed with stow. It was disappointing to discover there was no
firefox-esr in i386 OpenBSD and I had to seek an alternative for
those times I really must use the web. Ungoogled-chromium seemed like
a viable option so I installed it to give it a go. It was just a bit
too slow and clunky to be tolerable. On checking the power meter I
noted that the system was drawing only 17w... 

Encouraged by the fact that everything worked so well out of the box
with OpenBSD and that the system only consumed 17w, I pondered what I
could do to make it a potential daily driver. The next day I would
take delivery of a 120Gb SSD meant for the xeon...

When the SSD arrived I had already decided to try it out in the Atom.
Removal of two screws allows the HDD tray to slide out revealing four
more screws to remove the drive. I went through the same installation
procedure as the previous day and in under 20 minutes I was back at
the point where I could again try out ungoogled-chromium. The SSD had
pepped the machine up quite a bit, booting was noticeably more speedy
and everything seemed that bit more responsive. Chromium certainly
wasn't fast, but it was at least now tolerable. Just enough
sluggishness not to make you want to do too much on the web; it was
perfect! I used it for the rest of the evening.

This morning I took it apart and made a new BIOS battery[2], as the
old one had died forcing me to reset the date every time I unplugged
it. With the new SSD, and a second one plugged in via USB, it draws
just under 16w and does everything I need[3]. 


[1](gopher://gopher.icu/0/phlog/Computing/Computer-Upgrade.md)
[2](gopher://gopher.icu/I/images/asus2.jpg)
[3](gopher://gopher.icu/I/images/asus3.jpg)