Uses for a Second Hand PC

[RhysAndrews]

Hey guys.
This is probably a pretty silly question, but it is in no way vital, it's just out of a matter of interest more than anything.

Our old PC which we've had for about 6 years is on its way out, and so we've bought a new PC (this is the family PC, not my one) - so now our old PC is just sitting there, doing nothing other than a few final tasks we had to do to transfer settings and files and so on.

It's got a Pentium 4 2.4ghz CPU, 512MB of RAM (Kingston, I think), a GeForce 4 MX440, a Sound Blaster Live! 5.1 Sound Card, and no CD or DVD rom (put the old one in our new PC).

My question is, is there anything 'fun' I can do on this PC that could be either useful or just exciting? I don't want to screw it up, and I don't want to spend any money on it (perhaps we'll rake out an old CD rom for it sometime if I want to reformat), but I know some people get old systems to use as server PC's and so on, but I'm not entirely sure if there are other uses it could have. Any suggestions?

-Rhys

 

[IAntDemo]

2.4ghz and 512mb ram is good enough to play with a few games such as WOLFenstien et and maybe cs source
You can do quite alot actually , make pics, do sound music, umm, you know, you just can't play high advantage games but it seems to me its still a good pc to use.

 

[DJ-CHRIS1]

Hey guys.
This is probably a pretty silly question, but it is in no way vital, it's just out of a matter of interest more than anything.

Our old PC which we've had for about 6 years is on its way out, and so we've bought a new PC (this is the family PC, not my one) - so now our old PC is just sitting there, doing nothing other than a few final tasks we had to do to transfer settings and files and so on.

It's got a Pentium 4 2.4ghz CPU, 512MB of RAM (Kingston, I think), a GeForce 4 MX440, a Sound Blaster Live! 5.1 Sound Card, and no CD or DVD rom (put the old one in our new PC).

My question is, is there anything 'fun' I can do on this PC that could be either useful or just exciting? I don't want to screw it up, and I don't want to spend any money on it (perhaps we'll rake out an old CD rom for it sometime if I want to reformat), but I know some people get old systems to use as server PC's and so on, but I'm not entirely sure if there are other uses it could have. Any suggestions?

-Rhys

A torrentbox to download your torrents on, a secondary PC running a different OS or an older OS, etc.

 

[Remeniz]

It's not fun but this could be very useful.

You could set it up for Folding @ Home. Don't have anything else on it and run it purely for Folding.

Switch it on and leave it to donate most of it's clock cycles for medical research.

 

[root]

put a new graphics card in there with TV out, a tuner card and a lot of HDDs and have a media centre.

 

[4fingerninja]

build a network atteched storage server

 

[ssc456]

yeah just a few suggestions.

use it as a storage server.
use it as a experimenting machine, (e.g anything your not sure of or maybe a torrent you downloaded that had no comments)
use it as an experience machine like someone suggested maybe put another OS your not so fomiliar with to learn about it.
play with it see how much you can overclock it

 

[wol-va-rine]

A torrentbox to download your torrents on, a secondary PC running a different OS or an older OS, etc.

this was gonna be my suggestion...

 

[Mal1]

It's not fun but this could be very useful.

You could set it up for Folding @ Home. Don't have anything else on it and run it purely for Folding.

Switch it on and leave it to donate most of it's clock cycles for medical research.

I second this.
Folding@home is an excellent distributed computing project and could do with anyones spare machine clock cycles to help. You never know when it's findings might help you or someone close to you. I have 3 cpu's and 2 graphics cards currently running and as it only uses idle cycles you can't even notice it running (doesn't slow applications at all - would slow games if you played them)

 

[freestyler105]

Use it as a server. "Get" Windows Home Server, and use it for media/file storage, backups, etc. You can even run a web server at the same time.