8 ways to bring new life to your old computer
8 ways to bring new life to your old computer
Here are eight quick ideas of what you can do with an old computer. Not every suggestion is free, but the costs are kept to a minimum.
- Turning it into an audio media center
- Load up your favorite flavor of Linux, hook up some nice surround sound speakers into a Creative Labs Audigy sound card
and “rock out” to your favorite tunes using XMMS.
- Donating it to a local charity
- Money doesn’t grow on trees, especially for charitable organizations. A free computer, even if it isn’t working perfectly will be a real blessing to them. Often they have volunteer “geeks” on staff who will be able to get it up and running for them in the manner the charity can utilize.
- Turn it into a development machine
- Always wanted to learn some C++, C#, Javascript, Python, or other coding language? An older computer gives you the perfect platform.
- Make a poor man’s Tivo
- Get yourself a video capture card and spend another $100.00 on a larger hard drive. Then record your favoriter tv shows to the hard drive. There is even software out there that will allow you to set recording times, lengths, etc. At this point I’ve not tested any of tghe new software so I’m not ready to make a recommendation as to which one you should try.
- Install Linux
- No clue what Linux is or how to use it? This is the perfect chance because Linux will run on nearly any computer. And once you’ve learned how to install Linux you’ll feel like you accomplished something worthwhile. Not like you jumped off a 5 story roof as you might after installing Windows.
- Rebuild it
- Spend an afternoon learning how it fits together and maybe even learning how to perform simple repairs and upgrades to hardware. Tear it down, rebuild it; rinse, wash, repeat until you can do things like remove and replace ram, install a hard drive or whatever else. Your day or so of time invested learning on your old computer could save you hundreds of dollars in the future.
- Turn it into a firewall
- Network security has never been more important than it is today. Home computers are more vulnerable to attack than most corporate computer systems. Turn your old PC into a Smoothwall firewall, and get one step ahead of the bad guys.
- Give it to a friend
- Clean it up, load free and alternative software solutions for programs your friend can use and give it to a friend (or family member) for them to enjoy.
What do you do with your old computers?
Great article! Very true and helps dispell the Google is King myth!
Tony – Thanks, I appreciate that! But I think maybe this comment belonged over at my post about page rank woes? It just seems to fit there better…
Nice article. I like to use mine for surfing the Internet. You don’t need a new computer to do that.
Fred – I don’t know if I left that out because it seems so obvious or I just didn’t think of it. Either way great use of an old pc!
I wouldn’t recommend turning an older PC in to a development system for Microsoft Visual Studio. It really requires about 2GB RAM and a relatively fast processor to run at its best. My old system had 512MB and it was painfully slow.
Frank – No, neither would I. Was thinking more in terms of traditional “hand” coding than visual studio type elements.
All great ideas! I have an old computer that I added a bootable card reader to so that I could experiment with various OSes. I use it as a development machine too, but the removable “hard drive” makes it really flexible. No repartitioning and data loss, just buy another ten bucks worth of memory.