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https://www.pcmag.com/news/avoid-the-trash-heap-15-great-uses-for-an-old-pc
In 2019, after seven years of slumps, PC sales went up by the tiniest increment—0.3 percent. Demand then surged in recent weeks as people shifted to work-from-home setups due to COVID-19 quarantines. Which means some of you may be getting a new computer. But what do you do with the old PC?
You may be tempted to go the easy route and just junk it. But don't. If that laptop or desktop was created any time in the last decade, you'd be surprised by how much life you (or others) can get out of it. I'm not talking about limping along, but of ways to bring an old PC back to useful life.
[This editor can vouch for plenty of life in old boxes. For the past 4 years, a now-nearly-decade-year-old Core 2 Duo Laptop with 6 GB RAM has been my primary computer.--martyb]
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 30 2020, @03:03PM
The old PC is... let's assume up to Pentium I. A nice criterion would be a lack of NPU. These machines were perfectly working in word processing and some spreadsheets. Even few years ago I was doing spreadsheets on industrial machine - 8MHz 80286, 1MB of RAM, Lotus 1-2-3 2.2. AFAIR the machine is still there and its only problem is the F2 key which popped out from keyboard because you press it to apply the rules and start operating (tens of presses every day since 1994).
I currently do lots of things on my Asus with 2-core Turion and 2GB of RAM. I do engineering design in it, I use lots of small programs for e.g. topological optimization which were made in times when Win32 was a fresh technology. In parallel I got some text-driven parametric modeller which seems to work in any device I put it into. These tools happily work under WINE too. Then my assemblies are sent by ssh to 64-core workhorse in some server room which does the main numbers crunching.
So it works also in my Linux machine, 2x1.33GHz Core 2 and 2GB of RAM, which I rarely fill totally, in which I also do programming and some simple bitmap graphics.
Recently I had an opportunity to buy an ME-disabled Dell M4800 with 16GB of RAM and 4-core double-thread 4th gen i7. I started and configured Debian on it and it seems that it works perfectly. The desktop with terminal window and file manager eats about 240MB of RAM, standard for my configuration, not great but not totally awful.
I have finally found the way to make Firefox eat less RAM: Install NoScript or uMatrix, disable all JS by default and enable if and only if the domain is needed. This way the browser does not exceed 1GB of RAM with a dozen of tabs if used carefully.
So the hardware minimum I found for my usable configuration is 1GHz Pentium IV and 512MB of RAM. It means that I can work in this configuration, and better hardware allows me to do more: Like bitmap manipulation, programming, video processing. I usually put a Debian with bottom-to-top approach, means that I start with bare netinstall, then console, then X, then desktop environment, and then applications so this takes lot of time but gives control.
So after having so many resources, I removed the hard drive from my new Dell, put the second one for experiment and installed Debian with modern desktop, the KDE SC 5. It has some toy-like look and allows only a single approach to e.g. file manipulation or making .desktop files (no drag and drop like in KDE3, just write it in vim), but the avalanche of poor assumptions I found when using its file manager is enormous.
I have a directory called "samples" and it holds photos of materials research samples. The directory has about 10 thousands of PNG photos and weights about 18GB. Under Windows on Turion, it loads after a minute consuming about 30MB of RAM. Under modernized KDE3 on Core 2 Duo it loads after about 3 minutes consuming about 80MB of RAM. Under new KDE on modern i7 I killed the file manager when it overflown my 16GB of RAM, 18.5GB of swap and I saw that df gives me information that my home directory is going to run out of space in a moment.
What happened? Someone in file manager development team decided to turn on thumbnail view for such directories by default and the file manager started to process it right in its main thread, filling a whole RAM, but simultaneously caching these thumbnails to hard drive. I wish I could abort it or change the view to some list but it is in the main thread. This is not even a bug, this is a violation of a typical programmer thinking about scaling problems.
Meanwhile, Windows 10 still cannot properly display this directory on my friend's computer if he has less than a gigabyte of free RAM and contrary to KDE which has been explained, we still don't know why.
So if this is the modern computer program design, I would stay with my C/++, Fortran and Perl. And the old PC.