Use for an old pc

mic551

mic551

mic551

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Joined
28 Feb 2009
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71
Hi guys, i have an old pc that i would like your advise on, based on the spec of this pc listed below what would you do with it, all the suggestions should involve no money spending,as my plan is to give it a new lease of life for free

thanks

Intel Celeron 1.25GHZ Processor (Single Core)
256 MB RAM
30 GB Hard Drive
DVD Drive
On-board graphics
Floppy Disk Drive
Has Microsoft XP Home recovery disk
 
Install Openfiler or FreeNAS on it, bundle all your old hard drives into it, format them, and bang, you have a NAS storage server.

Or what Philly said.

Install xp and use it for a server.?
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Isn't that like suggesting you dowse yourself in petrol when you are on fire to cool yourself down? XP as a server, ho ho!
 
Been running XP on my home server for the past 6 months and it's been fine. It's a P3 1.4ghz with 512mb ram and a 1TB drive. It's currently is in use as a media server (PS3 media server), download box (running SabNZB+ and uTorrent), a print server and also runs Skype 24/7 with an external handset.

It handles all of that 24/7 simultaneously on XP without hitch :)
 
What are people's main reasons for bothering to have a home server? I'm interested and I have a spare PC kicking about but I can't see the big benefits.
 
valdai said:
What are people's main reasons for bothering to have a home server? I'm interested and I have a spare PC kicking about but I can't see the big benefits.
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See above, it's extremely handy as central storage for videos, music, photos etc. It's also a print server therefore allowing all computers to access the printer without having to have the main PC always on, it's also very handy to use for downloading, again so as not to leave the main PC on when downloading overnight for example.
 
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How many Dimm slots has it got as ive got 4 x 256 mb PC133 you can have for free if you want.Ive got couple of motherboards with faster ATHLON CPU,s on with heatsinks fans etc the ASUS board is overclockable if fancy having a play,ones onboard VGA and one has 64mb NVIDIA GEFORCE AGP card on it all perfect working order and 40G HD,few CD-RW and DVD roms,PSU,s .You can have the lot for free if pay postage as just old stuff havent used for years found the other week in box under the stairs tidying it out.If any of its any good to you let me know.
 
valdai said:
What are people's main reasons for bothering to have a home server? I'm interested and I have a spare PC kicking about but I can't see the big benefits.
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My main reason is the number of PCs in the house.

I have about 20gb of music, which I add to at a rate of a track or two a week. Before itunes/amazon mp3 I would just buy a handful of albums occasionally and add them to the 3 pcs at the time - but now I (or rather, we - I don't use them all) have 2 pcs, a HTPC, 3 laptops and a netbook between the 5 members of my family and my girlfriend.

The hassle of adding all that media to each system, and moving DVD rips etc around the place, would just end up taking half my life - not to mention all that redundant storage needed. Now I just bung all that shared info onto a single drive on one PC and leave it on - it's waaay easier.

Other thoughts are where you want to have a 24/7 pc for other reasons, eg CCTV or hosting a skype phone (superb idea, whoever said that! I'll be nicking that in the next day or two) or as an actual server. I've got an AMP package on mine that I regularly use when I need to show others a website I'm developing without wasting my proper webspace.

If you just use one or two PCs and don't need to share much, there's not much point - it just depends how you treat your media, really. My mum uses sky and DVDs and has no need for a server - her shelf is her storage medium, whereas I'm lost if I can't find what I want with the search bar from anywhere in the house (and outside it, if I so fancy)
 
binaryknight said:
whats wrong with using a perfectly stable os as a server? printer sharing..... check........file sharing.....check......

for a home server how much more do you really need?
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I'm still toying with the idea of building a server out of my old Athlon rig - runnign bare metal VMware ESX, an OpenFiler image connected to a couple of large physical disks, and a smaller couple of drives to run a Linux distro to do torrents and whatnot.

I'm not saying you can't or shouldn't run XP as a server [it's fine, as you say, for basic stuff] but if I want iSCSI, rsync and NFS for VMs and backups, Windows ain't too hot for that - Solaris, BSD and Linux [and WinServer 200x if you don't mind paying for software to give you solutions for things that *nix boxes will do for nowt, like iSCSI, if you read the manuals etc!] are better choices if you are comfortable with them IME - you can literally fire and forget :)

Also please note that as a professional IT engineer [we could go into details about just how professional I am, but lets not...;) ] I am LEGALLY OBLIGED to point out that anything by MS as a server is either a bit of a compromise or an utter joke. It's not that I agree with it, it's just the law :( ;)

[but yes, fair point about XP doing the job for basic stuff, and I was being slightly drunkenly fascetious with that comment - but as an engineer, at home I need more than XP can offer out of the box and my experience of supporting NT4/5/6 based server systems has been more painful than anything with an 'ls' command in it to date...]
 
terrybowst said:
How many Dimm slots has it got as ive got 4 x 256 mb PC133 you can have for free if you want.Ive got couple of motherboards with faster ATHLON CPU,s on with heatsinks fans etc the ASUS board is overclockable if fancy having a play,ones onboard VGA and one has 64mb NVIDIA GEFORCE AGP card on it all perfect working order and 40G HD,few CD-RW and DVD roms,PSU,s .You can have the lot for free if pay postage as just old stuff havent used for years found the other week in box under the stairs tidying it out.If any of its any good to you let me know.
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thanks, terrybowst

i am interested in some of those parts, a quick noob question how much will i need to pay p & p?, Also what sort of speed are the ATHLON CPU'S you mention.

thanks:)
 
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