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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: 3, Interesting) by DannyB on Thursday April 30 2020, @04:18PM (1 child)
Another thing.
What you mention about electricity cost is even worse for old servers.
Rewind to about 2008 . . .
Hey, cool, I can get some old servers from work for personal use! Woo hoo! (after they've been thoroughly wiped)
Not so fast. These may look like an over sized desktop mini tower, but:
* they are big
* extremely heavy
* very noisy
* have redundant power supplies, and power hungry
* typically multiple drives RAIDed
* redundant network connections, etc
. . . and while they were fantastic when they were new, they are truly obsolete now.
These type of machines (in my experience) are built like tanks. Indestructible. They can run forever, it seems. But they do not make good pets. Send them to electronic recycler.
Server machines: phenomenal cosmic powers, itty bitty VGA connector
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 2) by toddestan on Thursday April 30 2020, @11:46PM
The other problem I found with old servers, particularly from ones from OEMs like Dell, is that they are/were just plain weird. I remember playing around with some Dell servers about that time that were probably 7-8 years old. Take a 7-8 year old standard Dell tower or desktop, and you can install Linux on it no problem. But take those servers, and there was all kinds of strange incompatibilities, hardware that identified as one thing but acted like something else, odd settings in the BIOS that I couldn't find out what they did, refusal to work with random PCI cards I had around, and even when I got it running it never acted stable. Even on the Windows side it wasn't any better. The servers were originally running Windows 2000, but getting Windows XP on them was no easy feat, and even once installed there was a bunch of hardware with no drivers.
I found it vastly easier if I wanted a cheap server was to take one of the Dell Optiplex desktops, throw a second drive in and do software raid in Linux, and put it on a UPS. Easy to setup and those Optiplexes were solid machines despite the weird Dell form factors.