I am currently upgrading all of the PCs in the office here; the old machines are typically something like:
PIII 300MHz
32MB RAM
4 GB HD
Network card and (basic) graphics card.
Win98SE
There will be about a dozen of them, all in working order, but no monitors and only a few keyboards or mice.
So what should I do with them? Feel free to make any suggestion you like, facetious, selfish, serious or altruistic…
Hm, find a room, hook them up and run a SETI farm?
Find one of those foreign aid societies that takes computers and gives them to developing countries indigenes.
Find an organization that runs schools in foreign countries and donate them for the use in teaching students.
contact one of those womens interest groups that organizes villages female populations into collectives that sell handcrafted goods to the us, one computer to a collective would let the women get online [provided they could get electricity and a phoneline] to more effectively contact the rest of the world.
LAN party for outmoded games?
Is 300 MHz even an option with a PIII processor? That seems kind of low.
Wow, where’d the rest of my post go?
Try donating them to a public school or a retirement community. They’d be fine for Internet access, simple word processing or even just playing Solitaire.
Actually, I think you’re right and they are PII
I second this idea. I bet there’s a lot of demand out there for simple web-surfing and document editing that could be satisfied with equipment that gets thrown out every day.
Are these PCs ones that you can take off of the company site yourself? If you’re allowed to take one home and you have a full-time static IP address there, you could do what I did with my old 200 MHz system (64MB RAM, 10 GB HD). I’m running that machine as a Linux server on which I can use as a low-traffic web server or web page. I can also FTP files to and from it from anywhere. I might later on set up another old machine to run as a mail server under Linux as well.
I probably could take them home, but I don’t have a static IP here; I could set them up at work, where I do have a few spare addresses…
I like the distributed computing idea if you can’t donate them to a needy organization. There are many programs that are going on and there might be some possible benefit. There is an AIDS related program and cancer programs that I would check out. Maybe your company would like to sponsor something like that with these older machines.
Do what I did to a $2,000 speaker- throw them off a two story balcony.
Donate them to charity - a 300Mhz PII is still enough for basic web-surfing/email. That or set a up a SETI or Folding farm.
Better than just donating them to a retirement center, go there and hook them up and have someone teach the people how to use the internet.
However, the company I work at donated all their old computers to a non-profit organization. They were very happy to “upgrade” the much older crap they had before.
Here’s another vote for donating them to someplace that can really use them. However, I have a slightly different suggestion. I have no idea where you’re located, so I’m doing hypotheticals: Call the School Board office of some nearby large city … or the county office of some low population area in the deep south, southwest or west (including some of the reservations that don’t have casinos). Almost any such is likely to have either no computers, very old computers (would you believe 286s?), or NO computers.
In any such case, you will be contributing to the future of kids who need the help, and maybe one of them will grow up to be a doctor, or a scientist, or a nurse in a nursing home, or …
But you get the picture. 