Turning an old tower into a home server

[Sharpy1]

I have just booted the tower it will definitely boot windows XP I have a copy of windows vista ultimate installed on it at the moment

It says

Windows vista ultimate
Amd SEMPRON 3000+ 2.00 ghz (k7)
1.93Gb ram (1983 mb)
Standard VGA graphics adaptor
32 bit os

So what would you do
Thanks again

---------- Post added at 05:02 AM ---------- Previous post was at 04:59 AM ----------

Let me make it clear that this computer would do nothing other than download torrents and share files audeo and video I would not be using this computer for actual work or games or anything it would just be put away running itself

 

[Sharpy1]

Anyone else's opinions welcome

And thanks joe I use a newer laptop at the moment a dell Inspiron 1545 exact same set up I would just swap newer laptop for the older tower and stream to the newest laptop downstairs running kodi my hdd's at the moment are all NTFS 1tb external USB drives and my internet streams them perfectly the only reason I was wondering was because of the extremely low specs on the old tower will install XP and try will I need a certain edition of XP or will any have the features I need

 

[cb600fshornet]

Looks like you don't have the proper display drivers installed, BUT, that doesn't really matter if you're just using it as a server.

If I were you, I'd actually have a go at using the PC "as-is" with Vista on it, and see how it works as a file server, Vista should have slightly better sharing capabilities than XP to be totally honest. It's a bit of a heavy lump of an Operating System, but again, for simply sharing files it's okay.

tl;dr: If Vista works fine, then use it! As long as Vista physically runs on the machine, then you may as well keep on using it! No point messing if it aint broke!

 

[Sharpy1]

Vista works on the tower but it's very sluggish it couldn't be used for much running on vista I never used this tower as a computer it was more of a play thing I always used the dell laptop

And I think there is a graphics card issue never really looked into it tho it was more a tower to mess with now a want it to have a decent use instead of running the dell 24/7

 

[cb600fshornet]

If you're going to use it simply as a file server, just disable all the visual styles (so the start menu and taskbar is grey etc, and it looks old... ), put the music, films etc you want on it, and just forget about it until you want to add more films! It may run sluggishly when you're on it, but for streaming movies, the HDD and network is more important, and won't really be affected by whether you're running XP or Vista!

 

[BK_123]

Yeah XP or Vista should do the job. To get the best network performance you'd want gigabit, That's if your tower and router has it. Do you know if the integrated NIC is gigabit or not?

 

[Sharpy1]

Yes I have just removed all the visual themes for vista and it looks very windows 95 is there anything else I can do to improve the computers performance at this job without upgrading and how would you this up through the share option or different software thanks again joe

---------- Post added at 06:21 AM ---------- Previous post was at 06:19 AM ----------

I haven't got much idea about what type of internet speeds it is capable of bk

---------- Post added at 06:23 AM ---------- Previous post was at 06:21 AM ----------

Is there any services I can uninstall that the computer runs constantly that I wouldent need and could recover a few recourses

 

[cb600fshornet]

You don't necessarily even need extra software, you can just share the directory that the files are in on Vista over the network (you can usually right click the folder, click properties, then sharing options, and advanced sharing. You can then set "Everyone" to the share I think, so anyone on your network can access the files.

You can see what services and programs run at startup by running msconfig (just type it into "Run"), and selecting the startup tab.

EDIT: This might be somewhat useful for networking...
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-gb/...computers-running-different-windows=windows-7

 

[Sharpy1]

That's how a have set it up joe was set up the same on the dell laptop I was just wondering it would be better to use a different program instead of just using windows options

Another thing what security software would you recomend that will use as little resources as possible

On the dell I used a collection of avast anti virus online armour and Comodo program moniter n various others

---------- Post added at 09:54 AM ---------- Previous post was at 09:52 AM ----------

Thanks for that link joe I will have a read of that later could have some useful tips

 

[cb600fshornet]

Windows own built-in firewall is surprisingly good, so you probably won't need a third party one, something like AVG Free or Avast should be fine I would have thought in terms of an Anti-Virus program!