What to do with an 11 year old Dell?

[DJ-CHRIS1]

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.

Old hardware is unreliable, its just not worth it to run it. Shotgun


I have a p3 667 with 256 meg of ram running smoothwall (iptables based firewall).

 

[NEED WOW NOW]

ooo i no
u should underclock it and give it to a friend and tell him its fast as hell
Then when he says ferget this computer tell him to give it back to u then OC behind his back and then show him that its fast as hell and that he gave away a perfectly good computer it would be good if u did it to someone with a bad temper
but anyway server

 

[shagadelicman1]

i'd say server as well

 

[Rubber314Chicken]

server or toilet

 

[Half Evil]

Depending on how computer literate you are, you could turn it into a hardware-firewall. I've always wanted one!

However that seems a bit slow for even that.

Home server... Still too slow imo.

I personally would try some crazy cooling idea. Submerge it in some kind of liquid. Put lights in it. You know, make people go "Damn thats tight" when they see it.

 

[Rudster8161]

dip it in cooking oil without the cpu fan or heatsink!

 

[thelethalblow]

Smash it office space printer style

 

[Mammoth]

Put lights in it. You know, make people go "Damn thats tight" when they see it.

..So rice it up?

 

[GlasseyeUK]

It kinda frustrates me the sort of comments made on this post. Currently we are looking at ways of providing computers for people with disabilities as they can't afford to buy computers themselves.

They are currently dependent on others for shopping, contact with other people, even a computer such as bare specs as these, is perfectly feasible to use the internet, word processing, email etc....which would give them access to information which they have previously never had.

Look online for a local charity which clean the computer up, and then provide hardware to under priveliged families etc, they will be able to utilise it and maybe be able to help someone else at the meantime rather then burning or destroying it...

 

[DJ-CHRIS1]

Depending on how computer literate you are, you could turn it into a hardware-firewall. I've always wanted one!

However that seems a bit slow for even that.

Home server... Still too slow imo.

I personally would try some crazy cooling idea. Submerge it in some kind of liquid. Put lights in it. You know, make people go "Damn thats tight" when they see it.

Yeah oil idea is fine, but my software firewall could run off a 100mhz processor, it's a 667 but theirs hardly any load on it at all. My hardware firewall also has like a 66mhz processor, but thats one of the reasons it's in storage

It kinda frustrates me the sort of comments made on this post. Currently we are looking at ways of providing computers for people with disabilities as they can't afford to buy computers themselves.

They are currently dependent on others for shopping, contact with other people, even a computer such as bare specs as these, is perfectly feasible to use the internet, word processing, email etc....which would give them access to information which they have previously never had.

Look online for a local charity which clean the computer up, and then provide hardware to under priveliged families etc, they will be able to utilise it and maybe be able to help someone else at the meantime rather then burning or destroying it...

Over here, no charitys would accept a computer of such low specs, computers far better than it are thrown out every single day. Charity's have no problems here getting computers, they even get to pick and choose.