What can you do with an old PC? (1 Viewer)

[scottWI]

Very good condition, probably 5-7 years old. Still runs fast and never had a problem. I don't think old PC's have good resale value, so what do people usually do with their old ones?

 

[Tekara]

uhm, lets see, could put something like monowall or smooth wall on it and make it your new router. It can handle a lot more throughput than what you likely are using.

Could buy some more harddrives and make it into network area storage.

Can set it up in a secondary room as a media player

or as always, donating it to a school or the less fortunate is never a bad idea.

 

[scottWI]

ok...what do most normal people do (in getting rid) of old PC's quick and easy (sell, throw away, etc)? thanks.

 

[Joe D]

Donate it to someone less fortunate then yourself.

 

[Tekara]

For my old stuff I usually toss an ad up on my local online swap board. Ours is ran by a local computer store, but a google for "craigslist" plus the name of your town will likely pull up a swap board for your area that you can use. For almost everything I usually just price it to get it out the door.

But if you are interested in donating it to the less fortunate I would call one of the local charities, they should at least be able to direct you to the right place to contact for donation information.

 

[Danny boy]

I normally give it to my brother, who then strips it for parts that are usable in the current time. Or, you could always set it up in another room for a specific operation, such as music, DVD watching, downloading, etc. You can do a lot with an old computer. My dad has this computer just collecting dust in his woodshop in the basement, and I really want it to use for schoolwork, but he's not letting me take it

 

[Dennis*G]

5-7 years old your only options would probably be garage sale/give away. Most charity/donation places dont want anything over 5 years old.

maybe if you actually give the specs we can help you out a tad more, maybe even give you a market price.

 

[steveKlein]

a 5-7 year old PC could still be formidable. but we do need to know megahurtage.

if it's over 500mhz, i'm sure a charity or inner city school would be thrilled to have it.

 

[Vivek_IVB]

You are all either single or terribly nice people.

Stack up all your old PCs in the closet, right where your wife will get irritated.

Then, one day, get rid of all of them, and get a nice new expensive one instead. If she asks why, tell her that you were just following her shoes & handbags example...

 

[Reginald Trent]

Make sure you wipe your hard drive if you get rid of it as it might contain personal information on you.

 

[Sami Kallio]

I usually put my old computers to server work. Linux is a wonderful thing for that. Even the older ones run Linux + Apache (webserver) great. Nice to have one on 2MBit uplink; SuSe10+Apache+Gallery2 and I have a nice website where I can share photos with my family who live a few thousand miles away.

 

[DeathStar1]

I tried setting up Linux, but I couldn't find any d ecent directions. I know, I suck at web searches..... and don't shoot me because I couldn't find a setup.exe file to use ..

But when this old Dell goes by the way side for a nice cube shaped system, I may just decide to put linux on it and give it a shot.

 

[DeathStar1]

Yep, I forgot to wipe an old hard drive when I got rid of my old one.
I saw it in there, but I hadn't used it in months, and just didn't think that there was anything of major importance on it.

Thankfully the guy who bought it, noticed it, informed me of it, and wiped it for me. Either way, I changed all my emails and passwords to any site that was on there, just to be safe .

 

[Christ Reynolds]

go to linuxquestions and get started. we all know you are good at starting threads and the people there are very helpful.

CJ

 

[Kimmo Jaskari]

Definitely a good idea. Here is an easy way to do it for free, too:

http://dban.sourceforge.net

"Darik's Boot And Nuke" may not sound professional, but it really is pretty cool. You download a floppy disk image or a bootable CD image, create a bootable disk or CD, boot from it and can then overwrite and wipe any hard drives in the machine with a choice of basic wiping up to wiping way more thoroughly than even the US Department of Defense specifies. Good stuff.

 

[MarkHastings]

I was thinking of something like this. If the hard drive is big enough, what you can do is, set up iTunes on the system and load all of your songs to it. Then you can turn on music sharing and access that iTunes from any computer on your network. They stream flawlessly and allows you to access your entire library without having to lose precious HD space on all of your other systems.

Plus, you never have to worry about being on one system and find out that one of your songs is on your 'other' computer.

 

[Sami Kallio]

What's the advantage of using iTunes versus just plain old fileserver?

 

[MarkHastings]

Not much - I just like how the library shows up in my iTunes application like they are already living on my computer.