What to do with an 11 year old Dell?

do a crazy mod to it like
kool it with liquid nitrogen
and over clock it to 1ghz =O
dam i wish my comp could run that fast =P
 
I have to disagree with you on this one. Me personally, I would just throw a distro of 'Linux' on it (slackware) and install 2 NIC cards one for monitoring incomming traffic and the other one for monitoring outgoing traffic and install iptables from http://www.netfilter.org/ and use it as a *firewall* box.


I have an old dinosaur box 168mb of ram, 398mhz, running XP PRO it's fast for all the crappy specs. Also, I tweaked(customized) the OS so it runs faster than one would assume.

Exactly no matter how old a pc is it can still have some function . Some poor kids from Less economically developed countries would happily take that and use it
 
its even good for just testing stuff/messing about with. its always good to get some practice in. ive learnt a lot from my old computers, and its just fun having an old computer, brings back memories :p
 
If that's a G1, I'd keep it. That thing can push up to a 1.4GHZ machine.

Celeron 1.4, Socket 370 to Slot 1 ocnvertor and a PGA to PGA2 converter.
 
Okay, thanks for the ideas. Now to see what would work and what wouldn't.
Home server: I want, but I have a feeling there aren't any compatible hard drives available that are over say, 5GB. I don't know what kind of NIC it has, and finding a compatible one would again be a pain.
Overclocking the video card: I don't think there is a GPU..
Overclocking in general: Sounds like fun, maybe I'll learn on that before overclocking anything worth more than $10.

...Yes I think I'll overclock a bit and later take it apart to find out what hard drive type it is.
 
Well hard drive should be ide and if not just get a pci ide card
if it has pci ports which is should . you can also get a pci nic to use .
another point its a dell so you cant overclock it
 
I have to disagree with you on this one. Me personally, I would just throw a distro of 'Linux' on it (slackware) and install 2 NIC cards one for monitoring incomming traffic and the other one for monitoring outgoing traffic and install iptables from http://www.netfilter.org/ and use it as a *firewall* box. .

yeah, and then you have a computer doing what a single program can do, only real difference being that the computer is consuming power all the time. Yes the computer will be more effective, but it's not like a normal user needs anything more powerfull than a decent software firewall.
 
Well hard drive should be ide and if not just get a pci ide card
if it has pci ports which is should . you can also get a pci nic to use .
another point its a dell so you cant overclock it
Funny you say that. Here are the specs. Oh joy, it's a P54c. (Unoverclockable?) ...But it does have an EIDE drive so maybe I'm okay there. But then again I have a better (Yet still old) HP to use.
 
yeah, and then you have a computer doing what a single program can do, only real difference being that the computer is consuming power all the time

I would rather have a hardware firewall than a software firewall. Also, you can easily crash/bypass A *home software firewall* simply by performing a DoS type attack on it, try that on a hardware firewall and you would know it wouldnt be the first one to go down.

Yes the computer will be more effective, but it's not like a normal user needs anything more powerfull than a decent software firewall.

Well some of the members here are not *normal users* ;). and a lot of us have home networks either LAN or WLAN and an extra box on the network could *always* be useful in some way shape or form. How? Install a different OS on it? Make it function as a server, assign it a static IP address and have it be a fully functional server.

Have it as a test box on your LAN OR WLAN to break into. From Outside in Inside out.

Make it your system you test and run viruses & worms/spyware and other malicious computer code to see and analyze how it works, functions, the code that makes it function like it does etc...
 
i dunno what is the max you could put in there though . IF its something wimpy like 10gb just get a pci ide controller
 
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