I recently discovered I have an extra PC in my house I didn’t realize worked.
I’m almost certain it has a Pentium III 450, and it’s running 768 MB ECC RAM.
Before I decide to sell off it’s internal organs on eBay, does anybody have any interesting ideas for uses I could put it to?
Here’s oneidea, although this is a Mac.
Put a bunch of a disks on it, slap on some variant of Linux and use it as a cheap backup server / NAS.
Alternatively, put Windows Home Server on it and use it as a media streaming server for your house. Windows Home Server - Wikipedia
ETA: your CPU might not meet the basic requirement for WHS; apologies.
Given that it’s not really a performance beast, you won’t get much mileage out of running SETI@HOME or some such distributed computing program, but it’s an idea.
Donate it to a school/charity? I’m not sure they’ll accept a machine as old as that, but it’s worth exploring.
I give them away to kids who’s families can’t afford to give them a computer. Many kids need a home computer to practice on or do homework even if they do not have internet access.
I was going to use a similar situation to have a dedicated music server attached to my music system at home. A nice big screen to run iTunes and easier operation.
Moving from GQ to IMHO.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
Sorry about that, Colibri!
Yeah, I have a plan to do something along the lines of this home pc jukebox if I ever find a cheap touch screen. I’d want to mount it in the wall somehow though.
It can be nice to have an extra PC around that is clean and not tied to the internet, so it has no security problems and no security software on it. I have a laptop for surveying in the field and also use it for experiments sometimes, and it boots and shuts down quickly and never acts up. It has no security measures of any kind. You have to use a PC like this from time to time to appreciate what a pain all those burdens are.
But, I have to agree with others that it would be great to enable somebody else with a donation. There is always that balance between helping ourself and helping others.
Which reminds me of some things I should be donating…
And after using that, you go to help a friend who only has an old win box with ‘2000 home’ on it, a 800 Hz CPU and 256 of Ram, 100 Hz FSB and 5400 rpm HD. Never deletes temp files and has had Norton installed for years.
All I can do to keep my sarcastic mouth shut and not take a sledge hammer to it …
For the geek group, I heartily recommend the Linux server route.
Get the latest Ubuntu LTS (Long Term Support) server disk and start simple by setting up Samba, in order to have a NAS.
Things I have done with mine:
[ul][li]MP3 file server[/li] – I had nightly cron jobs run mp3gain on any new additions, nomalizing content
[li]Squid proxy + Dansguardian[/li] – a gateway, blocking the entire house from the dark underbelly of the Net.
[li]Web server running Wordpress, PHP, MySQL[/li] – allows me to play around with blog templates and blog ideas without actually messing with my public blog.[/ul]
I find the server especially useful as a development area for my blog website since I use Go Daddy’s Linux hosting for my public blog, so whatever I want to do there, I can try it in my own protected home network first.