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Avoid the Trash Heap: 15 Great Uses for an Old PC

posted by Fnord666 on Thursday April 30 2020, @04:51AM   Printer-friendly
from the new-life dept.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

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]

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 01 2020, @12:53PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 01 2020, @12:53PM (#988905)

    I’ve always been VERY appreciative of Linux support for old hardware. Just because a computer is a few years old, doesn’t mean that it should go into a landfill, or toxic recycling.
            I’m currently using an Apple B&W G3 from 1999 as a Linux based router for my home network. I’ve been doing it for years, and it works quite well. Plus the 64 bit PCI slots are nice, as well as the fact that the firmware cannot be written unless a specific button is pressed during boot. Used ethernet cards are widely available and cheap on eBay, which has been great. All of that is supported by Linux.
            My primary desktop right now is an old Opteron workstation. I’ve got 48GB of RAM in it, as well as a LSI PCIe based SSD. All of that is used hardware that I’ve been able to use, thanks to Linux.
            Imagine if the only OS you could run on the machine was the one that came with it. What would it mean? After the upgrades stop, into the garbage it goes, even if its still totally usable. Its a frightening thought.