My parents have an old Compaq Presario SR1950NX that works perfectly fine, but hasn’t been used in at least 15 years. Obviously I can’t connect it to the internet with Windows XP, but before I recycle it I thought I’d see if anyone had any cool ideas for how I could use it. I’m sure I could find Linux distro that would work, but I don’t really need another desktop PC in the house.
Obligatory Lemmy answer: Install Linux.
Seriously, though, it’s a great way of learning if you decide to set it up as a NAS
Using a spare system that isn’t in active use anymore to mess around and learn is definitely a good idea. However for long-term use I would keep an eye out for energy consumption. Depending on electricity prices it might make more sense to get a newer system with lower power draw, especially for something with high uptime.
That’s an interesting idea! I’ve never really messed with networking outside of just sharing files and folders between PCs. Sounds like a low-risk way to tinker and learn.
If you don’t need it, secure wipe it and give it to a thrift store. Maybe if you’re extra nice you can put a stripped down distro on it. Really your call. But someone in your area could use it, for sure.
Depending on the thrift store, they may not want it unless it has an OS. The ones in my area won’t take computers that won’t boot up into something. (They’re not at all tech literate and will just toss them.)
I snagged a perfectly good laptop out of their dumpster for that reason… just had to toss an OS on it and it ran for years.
Good on you OP for letting all these autistic people genuinely feel like they are telling someone about linux for the first time.
There’s love in this world <3
If it was mine, I’d set it up to run legacy console emulators for NES, SNES, Sega, etc. Good luck finding ROMs these days though, the big gaming companies keep having such sites shut down ☹️
I’ve still got my old NES, SNES, N64, etc, but it would be nice to have everything all in one machine
As much as I would love to see things repurposed, this thing is a dinosaur, and you’d be better off for both yourself and the environment to just recycle it and get a Raspberry Pi or something which can probably run circles around it at 10% of the power budget. You don’t need to keep something old to learn something new.
Oh! There‘s probably someone who wants this to play a specific game they have lying around as a CD-ROM. Nerds are like that, always needing the time appropriate hardware for their games.
Yes, I do own a low latency CRT TV to play smash melee, why?
Plex server. Especially good for parents if you have digitized movies and music.
It’s an Athlon 64 3800. It has no encode or decode cores for anything, sucks for software encode and decode, and burns 90W to do so. An RPi5 is literally almost three times the CPU performance at like 1/20th of the power budget and would probably run Plex better. Recycling is the best option.
Plex supports Direct Play — no encode/decode needed if the network is decent and the client (like Roku or AppleTV) supports the file format sent by the server.
“Obviously I can’t connect it to the internet with Windows XP”
Why not? I was on the Internet starting in 1988.
Probably full of unpatched security holes, but you COULD…
Old software here:
No websites will work, some there are new SSL encryption thingies which the old browsers don’t know. And new browsers surely won’t run on this PC.
