What should I do with my old computer?
I have an old computer that I just can’t seem to give away or make use of. It’s an old Athlon 64 2.4 ghz with a gig of ram, 160 gigs total hard drive space and a 256 meg Radeon X750 video card.
I originally had set up as a TV pc, but once I got a long enough cable I hooked up my main workstation to the television with much better results. Now it just sits in my closet taking up space. It’s far from bleeding edge up-to-date, but it’s nice enough that I don’t want to just throw it out.
I had given some thought to finding a cheap, small LCD monitor and making it into a really elaborate digital clock, but it’s way too loud to have running all the time.
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10 Answers
Save the things inside that are still operable. You might never need them but you never know.
Huck the rest at random cars.
Throw Win Home Server SP 3 on it and beef up the hard drives.
Turn it into a stripped down linux box
Why not donate it? There are schools/teachers/special ed kids/mental health community centers that would love to have it. Tax write-off as well.
You could hook it up to a projector and make slideshows, art installations etc.
Actually, that’s almost on-par with what I run for a desktop system. It still does WinXP and most games well enough.
There is also the possibility of making it into a home server. You don’t need much RAM or CPU to pull that off.
Other possibilities are donating it, giving it to someone you know who has no PC or a relic (I got my last three systems that way), or turning it into a “sandbox” to teach yourself Linux or programming or something without fear of wiping out your main system.
@jerv A home server! What a wonderful idea!
I’ve got a 10-year-old PIII that I use as a print server. I let my kid play her games on it, too. It’s on a KVM switch with my 2-year-old desktop that I use most of the time. I’d suggest getting one of those. It’s useful to have another computer handy when the other one is busy running a scan or applying updates.
Make it into a Domain controller, and we can make it a file server. This way, our files are encrypted, and we can download directly to shared drives!!!
My internet computer (I have many others for other purposes) is an AMD 64 Athlon 3200 2.1ghz, 128mb Video radeon, 1gb Ram, 160gb hdd, 40 gb slave, that I built myself from discard computers. It works just fine for forums and regular use, even downloads is not that bad. I got about 8 computers that I use for different things. The Gaming computer is 3 times better than this one. I got an old P3 1ghz Win 98 that I use for older games and software.
I suggest you keep it as a spare as computers have a way of dysfunctioning at the worse times. I’ve gone through about 10 computers in the past 8 years and not always my fault, just secondhand components wearing out, and a “spare” is always handy.
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