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duckwaltz
June 12th, 2008, 02:17 PM
Hello everyone,

I recently brought an old PC out of the closet and loaded it up with Hardy. The installation worked great and I've got everything updated, but now there is just one nagging question on my mind:

What can I use this old pc for anyway?

It is a 900MHz Celeron Coppermine with 512MB of RAM and a 30.0GB hard disk. It has an integrated graphics chip by Intel. As you can see, it doesn't have the greatest specs, but I'm convinced that there must be some way to put this hardware to use.

For what do you, the Ubuntu forum goers, use your own old PCs? I'm especially interested to hear about your own setups or zany projects. Have you upgraded an old machine for a project? Are there ways to tweak Ubuntu for better performance on older hardware?

issih
June 12th, 2008, 02:22 PM
Install mediatomb and use it as a upnp server for music/media.

Throw a dvb card in and set it up as a myth tv backend (this will work happily on even very modest hardware with dvb as there is no need for video encoding).

Grab a nice big harddrive (stupidly cheap at the moment) and set it up as a nas box for everyone else on the network, you could even use nfs if its a totally linux setup.

Basically anything you can think of ....chances are it will basically be used as a server of one form or another, but its good to have the option to play about huh :)

duckwaltz
June 12th, 2008, 02:25 PM
but its good to have the option to play about huh :)


Indeed it is, sir, thank you for your suggestions. I'm gonna start reading up on these things!! :KS

aaaantoine
June 12th, 2008, 02:32 PM
You could sell it or give it away to a person without a computer... If you can find one.

swells5
June 12th, 2008, 02:37 PM
i made a home web server on my old computer , pentium 2. I built a little web site with apache and now anyone can see my fishing photos on the internet.

kpkeerthi
June 12th, 2008, 02:38 PM
Found interesting results searching "Things you can do with an old computer (http://www.google.co.in/search?hl=en&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&hs=OPS&q=things+you+can+do+with+an+old+computer&btnG=Search&meta=)"

urukrama
June 12th, 2008, 02:50 PM
K.Mandla has some excellent posts about this:

Ten things you can do to keep an old computer useful (http://kmandla.wordpress.com/2007/03/16/ten-things-you-can-do-keep-an-old-computer-useful/).
Things to do with an old computer (http://kmandla.wordpress.com/2007/09/14/things-to-do-with-an-old-computer/)

Robux the great
June 12th, 2008, 02:51 PM
I would build a media server.

Regards

Rob