Constructive old computer use?

Post Reply New Topic

I have (and am making this post on, acutally- Internet Explorer 5!) an old beige box computer from circa 1997. It has a 166 MHz Pentium I processor, 31 MB of RAM, a 3 GB hard drive, and 10/100 Ethernet. The video card does not support anything more than 1024 x 768 at 256 colors. It has no USB ports. How could I constructively use it (i.e., not throw it away, leave it to rot, mash it to pieces, etc)?

It's enough to run Windows 98 (barely), so I might do that and run Office 97 on it, or put large hard drives in (FAT32, the Win98 file system supports 8 TiB (8192 GB!) volumes) and use it as a file server, but I'm not sure how to either share volumes in Win98, or to get WinXP to see Win98 shared volumes.

Ideally, the solution would not require the purchase of new hardware, or at least be too expensive (it's hard enough to find AT form factor stuff as is.) I am considering a PCI USB card, though.

If it were me, I would donate it to a charitable organization. That way you don't throw it out and contribute to toxic garbage levels. We have an organization in our town, called The Dignity Project, who accept older computers. They refurbish them, and donate them to low income or disabled people who otherwise couldn't afford a computer.

If your weren't looking to get rid of it, my apologies!

I had a 386 running for years as a print server it would also turn round a seti@home unit in about 2 weeks

(running OS2 not windows)

you could install linux and have a play about with that, old machines that you dont care about having to rebuild are the perfect place to get your linux wings

Warcraft II.

YES!! Excellent game!

*searches for his Warcraft II discs... they have to be around here somewhere...*

Such a box suffices for everything you want to do except gaming - at least under Linux. So yeah, experiment with Linux, maybe use her as server in a LAN, hell, why not put a server on it and use her (and dynDNS) to host your homepage?

Local Catholic school refurbs computers as a class and then gives them to underclassmen who can't afford them...perhaps your local career center or Vo-tech might do the same?

Get some more EDO DIMM's and install either Linux or one of the BSD's on it and use it as a small server, w/o 'X' of course.

Three words: OLD DOS GAMES. Nearly all of them are abandonware or freeware. They are extremely fun. I've done a lot of tweaking to each old game I have in order to get it to run on xp. So far, I haven't had to get an emulator

A least with 40MB, X runs, even though it is starting up like a snail. The special X they use in DamnSmallLinux however can start up faster.

Upgrade it to FreeDOS, and use it to play classic games as they should be played, such as Doom, Tomb Raider and Death Rally.

Why that you you can download MS-DOS 7 for free. Its free, By Microsoft and has more compatibility than MS-DOS 6, Win 3.1 but still with the ease of use/ compatabilty of DOS 6.

http://www.freedownloadscenter.com/Best ... os-7_.html

I would use that computer for playing old DOS games. At least with that one you can be sure the games will run with minimal tweaking.

I still have my 1997 Macintosh PPC G3 running MacOS 9.2 (last of the Macintosh beige boxes and a top-of-the-line model), 266mhz and souped up to 500 megs of RAM and a 60 gig HD. I had it upgraded to OSX 10.2.8 a few years ago when I bought my 3rd Gen iPod, but after a 2 or 3 years the OSX became corrupted and I downgraded it back to 'classic'. One thing that I liked about it was its ability to run in both OSX *and* 'classic' mode at the very same time ('classic' can run as an application on PPC-based OSX machines) and able to share files seamlessly between the two sides.

I still use it for word and image processing/printing and I can still share files between it and my current Intel mac Mini running OSX 10.4.11 via the ethernet port and all of its 'classic' apps, including net apps, still work flawlessly.

Mike

Debian or Damn Small Linux will work. Use fluxbox for Debian (Damn Small Linux uses fluxbox)