By virtue of my companies misguided attempt to reduce their excess hardware stash, I’ve just aquired a new PC. It was simply too cool to pass up. But now that I have it…what do I do with it??
2x1.0GHz P-III CPUs
1GB RAM
2x40GB hard disks
nVidia TNT2 32MB video card
DVD-ROM drive
Suggestions?
(And for you smartasses who say “Send it to me!”, let me throw in a pre-emptive “No! :p” 
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Sounds like a good system to run a server on. Possibly for games, or maybe as a media server.
If you flip the graphics card for a better one, you’ve got a pretty sweet media creation station.
Media creation? Audio? Video? The idea has merit.
I swapped out the TNT2 for an old Hercules 3D-prophet 2 mx card I had lying around. Not a huge step up, but better than it was. Is there a way I can plug it up to the DVI input on my (widescreen) TV?
You could do many cool things, or scrap it for parts. Create a nerve system with many different electronics, transform it into a monitoring station for RC vehicles, use it as an educational tool - really, whatever you can think of.
It is powerful enough to convert to a PVR system. There are some free programs out there or retail versions but you would need a capture card and a better video card.The best ones have hardware encoders so they don’t use a lot of CPU cycles.
This computer I’m using right now is a dual P3-1000 with 4x120 GB HDD in a RAID 0+1 config, a DVD writer, and a GeForce 4200 video card. It’s fine for everything I need - general office usage and showing videos - except games.
Well, you need a video card that has a DVI output - a cheap card with DVI can be found for $30 or so, or something like this Radeon 9550 would give you a fair bit of video processing power, and has a DVI port, for less than $70.
This is what I was going to say. We have two itty boxes in here (I think one’s a 300 and one’s a 450…so, like, .3 gig and .45 gig :P) - we’ve got RedHat Linux running on them and we use one as our file server and one as a mail server. I’m sure if we were younger and kidless we’d set one up as a gaming server and get some tasty WAN games going.
Of course, this guy’s trying to figure out what to do with an old, slow box which runs faster than my primary machine.
You can get a Hauppauge PVR-250 card for about $120 which will turn this into a cheap TiVo (with no monthly fee). It also records radio shows, so if you have good indie radio in your area, you can get some cool tracks for mix CDs. I record episodes of LOST, trim out the commercials, and burn 'em to DVD where I can watch them at my leisure. The included software is pretty intuitive.
A DVD recorder (even a pretty nice one) shouldn’t cost more than $65.
So, for just under $200, you can turn this thing into a TiVO and then some.
Unless you’re running an OS and app that can take advantage of 2 CPU’s you’ve really got (essentially) a 1 ghz P3 with a pretty creaky video card.
It’ll do fine for surfing, office suite apps, and old games but the latest games or other really demanding apps are likely to give it a serious case of the vapors.
Dual cpu’s, creaky video? This machine is begging for a compiler! Have you thought about writing your own programs, say with gcc?
distributed computing.
Heres a link from anandtech on projects you use your system to run.
http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview.aspx?catid=39&threadid=1370842&enterthread=y
After considerable research, here’s what I’m thinking of doing. Any feedback is appreciated:
It’s a Dell with a crappy power supply. So I’m going to upgrade to at least a 400w. I’m considering this 500w PS because I’ll be able to keep the case reasonably free of excess cabling, and because there’s a $30 rebate. Because Dell sucks ;), it doesn’t take the standard ATX power supply. So I’ll have to get this converter too - that runs about $14.00.
Then I’m going to throw in an ATI All-In-Wonder 9800. List price is $300, with a $50 rebate if you return an old video card.
It already has wireless internet, so I’ll throw on a wireless keyboard & mouse. I’m also thinking about adding another h/d for the OS and running the two 40Gs in a raid-0 config. I’ve got an extra controller & drives lying around, so that won’t cost me anything.
Total price (after rebates): $326 + shipping, so call it ~$350
you can still run distributed computing programs on it as well as use it as a PVR without affecting performance. Distrubuted computing programs generally have uberlow priority so when you actually decide it essentially turns itself off.