The Reviving Of Old PC's

Now, when I mean older PC's, I dont mean PC's from the 90's. I mean ones from 2001-2006, or so.

This Thread is for general discussion about what people should do with older PC's. Just list your ideas & thoughts on this dicussion.
My thought on the matter is to turn PC's into servers for websites and for online storage. And if there good enough, gaming servers. But not like MMO servers, just deathmatch type games and so forth.

I have 2 2001 PCs that run gaming servers for the following HL mods: TFC, Vampire Slayer, Natural Selection and Battle of the Millennium.

You can also turn them in arcade machines. Hook them up to a TV/Projector...download 2 to 4 player games...get 4 wireless controllers...and have fun with the family and/or guest.

Or you can fix them up and donate them to local community centers for a nice tax break.

I have (working!) a 286, Pentium 200mHz, Pentium III 600mHz that I let my nieces play old DOS and Win95 educational games on.

I gave my parents my old Pentium 4 2.0A Ghz for surfing the net and e-mailing me and a Q6600 2.4gHz Quad core for myself It will be time to upgrade soon:lol:

My wife has been using a Dell 400sc server P4 2.4 ghz. In case none of you recognize that, back in 2004, Dell started selling these servers for small business, except they used mobos that had AGP slots which were the most up to date graphics slot at the time. These sold for about $200 and people were buying them up like crazy turning them into high end gaming machines. I personally bought about 6 to use as workstations at my office. I also picked up 2 Emachines bundles from Office Depot for $250 each which included AMD Athlon 64 2.0ghz and a 15" LCD around that time also. They're still being used as a DVR and a slingbox receiver for my tv. I spent a ton on tech during those few months.

I put FreeNAS on my old PC and use it for a local file server and backup solution. It has a web browser interface so you don't even need a monitor hooked up to your old machine once you get it up and running, just access it from another PC on your network.

http://www.freenas.org/

How is the setup for FreeNAS? I'm only used to installing Windows OS's and just running XP right now with shared folders.

I would agree with the donating, local school/library/retirement home/hospital, maybe even fire/police departments

storage doesn't make much sense to me, just pull the harddrive and get an enclosure for $10

[quote name='boneless']How is the setup for FreeNAS? I'm only used to installing Windows OS's and just running XP right now with shared folders.[/QUOTE]
Not too difficult. The instructions are pretty detailed and give more options than I really wanted (which is good) since I was just interested in a file server I could access from my Windows PCs. So in my case I just needed to set up the CIFS (SAMBA) protocol after getting the server OS installed. Here is the guide:

http://www.freenas.org/index.php?option=com_openwiki&Itemid=30&id=sug:en

[quote name='vherub']I would agree with the donating, local school/library/retirement home/hospital, maybe even fire/police departments

storage doesn't make much sense to me, just pull the harddrive and get an enclosure for $10[/QUOTE]


Its nice to have if you want more than a single hard drive for backup or if you want it with network access without having to spent lots of $$$.

Old computers work great as both backup and media shares. If it is not very loud they also sometimes make nice DVRs.