

Things to do with an old computer. Anyone can add more ideas? - hippich
http://kmandla.wordpress.com/2007/09/14/things-to-do-with-an-old-computer/

======
jdietrich
Discard it. Old computers are _less than worthless_.

Let's say you've got an old Pentium 4 machine that you want to make use of -
nothing ancient, still perfectly capable of doing useful work. If you use it
as BitTorrent machine, it'll easily suck up 150w. As a distributed computing
node, more like 300w. Running 24/7 that's 1314 kW/h or 2628 kW/h a year.

In the UK, cheap electricity costs around 13 pence per kilowatt hour, meaning
that this 'free' old machine will cost you £170 a year with a modest workload
or £340 a year if working hard. An Atom-based nettop will consume around 30
watts under load, will have comparable performance to a fast Pentium 4[1] and
can be bought for less than £200.

The only reasonable thing to do with an old computer is discard it, or recycle
it if you don't mind the idea of a Chinese child stripping it for parts[2].

[1]
[http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_lookup.php?cpu=Intel+Atom+N2...](http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_lookup.php?cpu=Intel+Atom+N270+%40+1.60GHz)
[2]
[http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/static/in_depth/world/2002/...](http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/static/in_depth/world/2002/disposable_planet/waste/chinese_workshop/3.stm)

~~~
hippich
up-voted because of nice comparison of performance of atom and p4 cpus, but
35W is what cpu eats alone (vs ~110 for P4 cpu may be?). How much atom-based
nettop will consume watts in total?

And what about I/O throughout, is nettops compared to desktops?

I think about either reusing existing old desktops or buying one of these
nettops for: 1) home network server, which will act as media storage and as
VPN gateway for home network. 2) media server for my tv

------
bitsai
In the same vein as "Cluster it", you could also use old computers as testbeds
for experimenting with map-reduce frameworks like Hadoop.

------
mooism2
Replace it with a newer, more powerful computer that uses less energy?

