Use of old pc?

[JinamS]

Can someone tell me what I can use an old pentium 4 pc for?

[noisebomb44]

writing documents, programming, listening to music, playing old games

[manikyath]

messing around mostly, take it apart entirely, clean it out, put ot back together, install linux on it, if you break shit try to repair it.

 

its like learning how to repair cars by keeping an old banger running.

[Qyoon]

give lesson to people on "how to".

Or give it to somebody that can't afford a pc at all.

 

In france next to where i live i worked for nothing into a shop that was giving second life to old pc.

Selling them for 50€ wich is really cheap concidering they are sold in really good shape ready to use.

 

PC what are crap to our eyes can be really usefull for some poeple.

[Guest]

Learn linux on it, doesn't take much power to run some of the distros and its really fun going through all the trouble that it brings  at least its what i would do 

[7h3r3i5n0c4k3Linu5]

Make a bad ass router out of it. 

[FullTank1337]

Install Linux. Preferably a Debian-based distro with LXDE or XFCE. Something like Lubuntu. Maybe throw Windows XP on as a secondary OS...? That way you can play all your DX9 single-core games that run like crap on Win7 and newer.

While you're at it, go ahead and max out the RAM (should be able to take 2 or 4 GB) and get a graphics card for it. Pentium 4s are actually pretty fast, they are just limited by the one core (and the cache, and the thermal output...and the 32 bits) just make sure you dust it out, because CPU throttling on an old clunker is a big problem, even with tons of RAM, and a semi-badass graphics card (like 2GB of VRAM) 

 

Other than that, you can make it into an office PC for documents, media center for videos up to 720p (maybe 1080p if uncompressed?), local file server, Router, the list goes on.

If emulators are your thing, it should be just barely enough to run Higan in Linux if it's a 3Ghz Pentium 4 with DDR2 RAM. It also might come in handy if your main PC doesn't support IDE.

[Wardaddy]

Play GTA V on it

[givegomezthegun]

I have a friend who, up until last december when I helped him build a new pc, was actually using a p4 system for gaming.  Granted it wasn't spectacular, and he became a pro at turning settings down, and then disabling more through game files.

[idupes]

Router
Media streamer/NAS
Asterisk (PBX) box, I'm a bit oldskool

 

Target practice

Door stopper