My company did a spring cleaning sweep today, and collected a broad assortment of junk & things in the office next to me. I snagged a bunch of “good” stuff, including a Dell 486P/50, just the desktop unit, no monitor, cables or such…assuming it boots when I get it home, what can I do with it? It seems to have a NIC, 5.25", 3.5" drives, 2 serial, 1 parallel, and 1 video port, along with ps/2 style mouse and keyboard sockets. I don’t know how much memory or hd space it has…or what software is on it now. Any ideas?
I’d sell chances to bash it with a sledge hammer for $1 each. With gets to take out his/her computer frustrations on the machine. It would probably be a good fundraising idea for your company’s favorite charity, too.
StG
Anchor? Paper weight? High velocity Rifle Target?
If you completely tear apart the hard drive you can get one, possibly two since it’s an older drive, of the best darn fridge magnets you’ll ever find. You could stick a leather boot to a fridge with one of those harddrive magnets.
That there is a firewall/router.
Or a linux playground.
Or a game-station for all those old games you have lying around.
Or a nintendo emulator for the nintendo games you have that no longer work.
Or a valuable gift to some small organisation or disadvantaged young/old person nearby (it is fine for email, light webbrowsing, word processing, creating and adminstrating a webpage, etc).
As a speedbump check. Leave it around a sharp turn on a fast road.
Nice Linux machine, as long as you don’t give in to temptation and try and install X-Windows on it.
If you want to do something useful with it, set it up as a Linux-based firewall.
Donating it to a local charity is actually a bad idea as it would only saddle them with an unusable computer. It won’t be useful for email or browsing unless you can dredge up a copy of Win3.1. AOL won’t run on something that slow, and neither will Windows 98 - Microsoft calls for a minimum of 66 MHz for 98, so don’t even think about a current version of Windows.
Not at all. I ran Slackware on a 386/40 witih 8Mb a long time ago. Window performance was actually faster than on my work Sun IPC. Blink of the eye stuff. Unfortunately Linux distros have bloated lately, so an older version (and/or doing your own compiles) would be a good idea if the OP wanted to go this way.
If you have an old computer and want to sell it, parting it out is pretty much the only way to go.
This site is a great place to start. You can really get your creative juices flowing while reading about this guys work… although I do question his sanity! :dubious:
Play DOS games
Use other software written before 1993
excellent door stop
schools/churches/other non-profits around here will generally accept nothing less than a PII 350 MHz. Try to make sure it doesn’t wind up in a landfill, although that is easier said than done.
Oh come on. A 486/50 will run Windows 95, easy. I had a 486/25 that ran Win95 just fine. As long as the HDD is at least 250 or 500 MB then you’ll be fine. We don’t know how much RAM it has, but I think 16 MB would be recommended.
I still have a 486/75 with 16 MB of RAM, but a very small hard drive (168 MB or something like that). When I last turned it on (a few years ago) it got me on the Internet via IE 3 and an external 28.8 modem. The main thing that hampered me from using it more was that it had such a small HDD, and there was a “backup” copy of Win 95 on that “extra” space which I did not want to remove. Had I a little more disk space, I would have upgraded to IE 4 and installed a few other slightly more up-to-date apps so it could serve as a low-end casual browsing/email machine.
I don’t know about you, but I always seem to know more than a few people (or their kids) who would LOVE a computer—any computer. Just being able to get that high-falutin’ thing called email would be a big thrill for them.
yosemitebabe is right. We’re spoiled by Java appelets and Flash animations. When I was a teen without a computer, I wouldn’t have minded an outdated machine one bit. Just think of all the stuff a poor kid could learn today with a $10/month Internet connection, even if he could do little more than view text and still images on the web.
Of course, saying the preceding makes me feel like a total ass because I have a PII-350 and a Celeron 500 collecting dust in my spare bedroom…
The deciding factor on whether you can run Windows 95 without it being too slow to bear is definitely the RAM. If whoever owned it never added RAM, it probably only has 4-8MB. My first computer, a Pentium 75, came with 8MB. I wasn’t happy with Windows 95’s performance until I bumped it up to 16.
I’d salvage the drives, RAM (some offices will pay top dollar for old SIMMs) and any fans. If there’s a case fan, take it out. Open up the powersupply and nab the fan from in there as well (careful about what else you touch in there, though 
). Other than that, unless you want to keep the case for something, I’d put the rest out at the road for garbage pick up.
Thank you yosemitebabe 
Same here, my old 486 (8 megs ram thank you ver much) runs win95 like a dream. Well, not like a dream, but it is exactly as fast as it was the day I bought it. It has saved my ass many, many times with it’s 28.8 modem when I have screwed the “big” computers and needed a driver fast. It is still used regularly.
It has also provided an excellent chance to experiment with “case modding”, it is in the process of going dark-grey with a lit window.
If your local organisations won’t accept anything below a certain standard, then I would consider that fairly unspeakable, but that’s up to them. Ring a school, or a youth group or something and ask if they can think of a kid that might have a use for it. There is nothing wrong with the computer, it is our expectations that have changed. The computer is as fast as it was when it cost 2 grand. We are just used to faster. Give it a loving home
Take two tower units, put a board on top, and it makes a stylish coffee table.
(NurseCarmen, take two hard drive magnets, Put on on each side of your hand. They hold. They will also raise blood blisters if you get your fingers too close.)
re "some offices will pay top dollar for old SIMMs ". I have a load of 30 pin and 72 pin SIMMS. Who is paying any kind of money for these things? All the prices on Ebay seem to be only few bucks (or no bids) for most of these older SIMMS.
If you live close to a PC Users Group they might accept it as a donation for a service project. The NTXPCUG makes sure everything runs, old stuff cleaned out, ID all components, etc., and put together systems for blind folks.
I was being a bit sarcastic about the “top dollar” thing. I sold a small box of 72 pin SIMMS for $150 to a smallish office around here. As far as ancient computer upgrades go, that’s not bad. Most people aren’t after one or two modules (hence the low bids on Ebay).
If any of you have FPM (Fast Page Mode) ram about gimme gimme gimme Send me an email if you are feeling charitible and would like to trade it for candy from Sweden