Turning an old tower into a home server

Sharpy1

In Runtime
Messages
211
Location
England
i wanted to use my old tower as a file server to stream videos and music to a different computer running kodi media centre what os would anyone recomend on very min specs
 
Thanks for the reply I have been reading about free nas I stopped reading about it because i read about two problems

1) it has problems supporting NTFS formatted drives
2) there is little to no support for WIFI

And thanks for the link I love a link I had already read it tho lol :)

---------- Post added at 03:31 AM ---------- Previous post was at 03:30 AM ----------

My old Machine is an old HP windows XP tower it has just under 2gb ram system shows it to be around 1.9gb for some reason
 
There should be a licence sticker on the side of the machine, what OS is it for?

If you have a licence sticker, then you can get a Windows Operating System for free, legally! :D
 
It's a windows XP tower with a windows xp home edition sticker

It's a HP UTOW QUA

---------- Post added at 03:42 AM ---------- Previous post was at 03:41 AM ----------

I was also just thinking of using XP as a media server but have heard about a problems forgetting shared folders when sharing to newer computers like 8 8.1 10
 
I'd have thought XP would work fine as a media server, I'm sure if XP does inded have those problems, then somebody will have made a third party software application that'll do the same job more effectively!
 
Windows is prob easier to stick to do you think it will be able to handle the load of sharing video files in various formats and different quality like 1080p on the small specs in the tower it's only got 2gb ram and a very old AMD processor
 
XP should run fine on 2GB RAM, I'm guessing you have an old Athlon 64 chip or better, (possibly a 3200 or similar?). As long as you have the hard drive space for 1080p film etc, then I'd anticipate the PC should be able to handle it okay!

The PC itself doesn't even have to recognise the file format if you're simply sharing the files, as long as the PC that is using the shared files can view them, then you're good to go!

Hope this helps a little, if you need anything else just shout! :)
 
At this moment I aren't exactly sure what processor is in the tower I haven't looked at its specs for quite a while it's lust lying about being unhelpful all I no is that's it's a old AMD SEMPRON processor

What would you say the min requirements are for the processor I will have to boot the tower and look

Any help is always appreciated thanks :)
 
The Semprons were the budget chip back then, so the PC won't be winning any speed medals! Should do the job okay though.

As long as it boots XP (which it should, I've built XP machines with 1GB RAM and Sempron chips and they run fine).

As long as the network/hdd combination is up to the task of copying movies etc, it should work well. From the overall picture I've gathered then it should work! Nothing to lose anyway, XP won't cost you anything as you already have a licence, and theres nothing to upgrade, so its worth giving it a shot!
 
Back
Top Bottom