Modding What Should I Do With a OLD Computer?

It was late, give me a break

And if you ahve a few of the old ones, you could make a small cluster. crunch distributed.net keys or whatnot. or you can try and re-render LOTR3 using nothing but pentium 200mhz in one big cluster! you would only need 2 of them, take about an hour

 

get a pile more (10 or so) and thow a beowulf cluster together. While a p 200 or whatever is lame, a pile of them all working together is awesome. There's plenty of info around (search http://www.google.com/linux) and it's a brilliant way to learn linux. I'd suggest gentoo for your distro, since it's compiled for use on your hardware, so will run more stable and fast than if you just put on a standard distro. The cluster ~would~ be capable of being a webserver, and you can just leave the machines in a cupboard or your basement or whatever, and get at them using SSH (gives you a terminal over tcp/ip). All you'd need to buy would be a switch (must be 100 base) and ask for peoples old machines (use the FS forum/ go to your local tip)

alternatively set it up as an FTP and DHCP server for your next lan, it makes set up so much easier. You just pile all the patches you're going to use into /home/ftp/pub, and tell people they're there, and no more incompatible patches =D

DHCP it really really useful too, especially for a lan with < 20 people

 

Two words....Pong Altar

I had a customer that still has his original 8086 with I think the maxed out memory (16kb I want to say) that he originally bought for about $5,000. He now has it an a big armoire type thing with a glass front, hooked up to a UPS and generator backup, playing PONG 24/7.

Pretty cool if you ask me.

 

I set up a small network and ran DOOM and Quake on four 486 machines. It was tons of fun having people over and blowing each other up (or axing ).

 

iv got about 4 old 486's and i plan on making one a cd player, one a in car mp3 player and i dont know what to do with the other 1!!!

 

I live in Fairfax County...and yourself?

 

Ha. Same here. Whoa ****.

 

Well i knew some people who would use it as ash trays well with the OLD mac ones i mean... they just bash in the screen and clean the inside of it out..
but if you just have the computer u can take everything out and use it as a basket, id use it for anything..

Steve~