Wednesday, May 18, 2005

What to do with an old computer?

I have an old computer which has not seen much use in the past year-and-a-half. I want to get some kind of value out of it, but not sure how. The specs are as follows:

Pentium III 800Mhz Coppermine
384 MB RAM
30 GB HD
GeForce 2 GTS 32 MB

Other than that the hardware is very typical. It has a couple of generic network cards, a 56k modem, and a very old 24x CD-ROM drive. The monitor on it is not functioning properly (Acer, go figure). I haven't been using this computer because my Thinkpad T42 out-performs it in every way.

Anyone have any suggestions for what to do with it? I do NOT want people outside the network to be able to access it, so a web or FTP server is out of the question.

One idea I have been kicking around is to have it as a Linux-only box. However, I don't think that will be terribly useful because I already have a WinXP Pro/Ubuntu Linux dual boot on my laptop. Another idea would be to just have it as a Windows printer/file server for everyone on my network to use. Then again, I can't see much value coming out of that.

The computer may be "obsolete" depending on your perception of how fast a computer needs to be, but I know this machine is far from useless. I am open to any creative suggestions anyone out there may have!

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