wwyd with older found PC

[347]

So I found an old PC outside of a dumpster the other day and on a whim just brought it home and it works. Firstly, whoever got rid of it didn't clean the drive and it was a business PC and there were spreadsheets and who knows what else on it, so I wiped it. I'm wondering what, if anything, to do with it. It's an acer from 2007, model apfh-ud2160p with pentium dual core and 1gb ram but upgradable to 2gb. I already have a pi3 setup for home media and a pi zero I have for video game emulation, so not really sure I want to just keep this computer unless it can do something my other stuff can't. Anyhow, just thought I'd put this out there for ideas of what to do with it (donating it is, of course, an option)

[Clarkius]

Could try and refurbish it if you want to make a quick profit off of it. (Depending on the condition and age of the PC) 

[Lenovo1984]

If you need it, you can put a fresh copy of Windows XP on it and use it for older games. Otherwise, it would make a better home server than the Pi 3 you have (other than power consumption, but it still shouldn't be much) given that it has 10/100/1000 ethernet. 

[PianoPlayer88Key]

19 hours ago, yaboistar said:

clean it out, renew the bios battery, give it a fresh coat of paste and throw a linux distro on it. play around with the old hardware and use it as a machine to answer your questions such as "what happens if i remove xyz while it's running"

I'd actually like to see someone do that ... with a CPU.   (And no cheating by doing it on a server system with redundancy / hot-swapability.  Reminds me of a car-based youtube channel where he posted a few videos of experiments with what happens if you shift to reverse or park while driving forward at near highway speeds, although he didn't come close to the 80 mph common in San Diego, CA, or the 100 that I've seen now and then.  He basically did them in a modern car with an automatic transmission, and even a 1998 car with an auto trans also didn't "act up".  He should have done it in a 70s or older car with a manual transmission.)

 

[Animal901]

Upgrade the ram to max capacity.. probably 4 gb. Should do dual channel with 2gb sticks.. get the good stuff. if you're lucky the board can see 4gb sticks. Older boards think 4gb sticks are 512mb.  will be roughly $20 to $25 on Ebay. Upgrade the bios.  Upgrade the cpu to a core 2 quad with 12mb cache if you can. 2nd best is duo with 6mb cache... theyre $20 to $30 now. so look up supported cpu for that mobo. Put a 240gb ssd on it. Decide a cheap but ok video card.. for cheap builds ati/amd firepro v5900 is ok.. gtx 645 is a little better. Those gpus would be plenty for that stuff.  You'd be able to play alot of games and everyone will tell you it can't do any of that.. i do it all the time for people.  They save alot of money.  Everyone's happy.  Less trash at the dump.  A Linus tech tipper gets their wings.