What Do You Do With Your Old Computers?

[knate5000]

I recently got an old Compaq 5000 (P4 1.6Ghz)for free. I already have an old Dell I bought a few years ago and a 1 year old gaming pc that I custom built. There are no parts in the Compaq that I could use, but surely there must be a use for it.

 

So what do you do with old computers?

 

I was thinking about install Linux on it to mess around with.

 

Any suggestions?

[Madmanmcp]

So what do you do with old computers?

 

Do you have a door in the house that just won't stay open?

Do you have a boat that keeps floating away?

Does your desk sit near a breeze and the papers keep blowing away?

Is there an empty spot in the basement that needs filling?

 

I usually strip out the parts and save for a couple years for replacements. After awhile I toss them when I am sure they are not needed anymore (I fix friends and neighbors computers). The P4 is way past the time I would keeps its parts. I would just toss it.

[TCH-Bruce]

So what do you do with old computers?

I'm still using mine.....

[Jeren]

One of my old desktops will be getting linux (Ubuntu). My other one I will uninstall programs off of and make a dedicated Trade Wars server.

[stevesh]

If it works and you don't need it, check out freecycle.org - someone in your area will want it.

[boxturt]

Freecycle is good, yes. Senior Citizen and Veterans groups will often take working machines as well.

[wampthing]

Ive done a couple of things with mine.

1) Ive installed freenas on one and use it as a home server to store local files to share with all of my other computers. This one is a way old computer. Were talking back in the days with 384 meg of ram was a decent amount (I rarely use more than half of it). There are a lot of fun things that you can do with it (bittorrents, Itunes/Daap, etc). worse case scenario its fun to tinker with.

2) Another thing that I have done is to attach a large hard drive to an older computer and run Mozy and Logmein on it. I then stuck it in a closet and run it essentially headless (using logmein.com). Then I have all of my other computers back up to it. This accomplishes two things for me, 1) I have a local back up of everything and 2) I can have one $5 license of mozy to have an off site back up all the information that has been aggregated from the rest of my computers.