What can I do with an old Compaq PC other than recycle it?
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Obligatory Lemmy answer: Install Linux.
Seriously, though, it's a great way of learning if you decide to set it up as a NAS
Using a spare system that isn't in active use anymore to mess around and learn is definitely a good idea. However for long-term use I would keep an eye out for energy consumption. Depending on electricity prices it might make more sense to get a newer system with lower power draw, especially for something with high uptime.
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My parents have an old Compaq Presario SR1950NX that works perfectly fine, but hasn’t been used in at least 15 years. Obviously I can’t connect it to the internet with Windows XP, but before I recycle it I thought I’d see if anyone had any cool ideas for how I could use it. I’m sure I could find Linux distro that would work, but I don’t really need another desktop PC in the house.
"Obviously I can’t connect it to the internet with Windows XP"
Why not? I was on the Internet starting in 1988.
Probably full of unpatched security holes, but you COULD...
Old software here:
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My parents have an old Compaq Presario SR1950NX that works perfectly fine, but hasn’t been used in at least 15 years. Obviously I can’t connect it to the internet with Windows XP, but before I recycle it I thought I’d see if anyone had any cool ideas for how I could use it. I’m sure I could find Linux distro that would work, but I don’t really need another desktop PC in the house.
Pihole, file server, Home Assistant/Music Assistant + Jellyfin.
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"Obviously I can’t connect it to the internet with Windows XP"
Why not? I was on the Internet starting in 1988.
Probably full of unpatched security holes, but you COULD...
Old software here:
No websites will work, some there are new SSL encryption thingies which the old browsers don't know. And new browsers surely won't run on this PC.
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My parents have an old Compaq Presario SR1950NX that works perfectly fine, but hasn’t been used in at least 15 years. Obviously I can’t connect it to the internet with Windows XP, but before I recycle it I thought I’d see if anyone had any cool ideas for how I could use it. I’m sure I could find Linux distro that would work, but I don’t really need another desktop PC in the house.
Good on you OP for letting all these autistic people genuinely feel like they are telling someone about linux for the first time.
There's love in this world
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My parents have an old Compaq Presario SR1950NX that works perfectly fine, but hasn’t been used in at least 15 years. Obviously I can’t connect it to the internet with Windows XP, but before I recycle it I thought I’d see if anyone had any cool ideas for how I could use it. I’m sure I could find Linux distro that would work, but I don’t really need another desktop PC in the house.
As much as I would love to see things repurposed, this thing is a dinosaur, and you’d be better off for both yourself and the environment to just recycle it and get a Raspberry Pi or something which can probably run circles around it at 10% of the power budget. You don’t need to keep something old to learn something new.
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Plex server. Especially good for parents if you have digitized movies and music.
It’s an Athlon 64 3800. It has no encode or decode cores for anything, sucks for software encode and decode, and burns 90W to do so. An RPi5 is literally almost three times the CPU performance at like 1/20th of the power budget and would probably run Plex better. Recycling is the best option.
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My parents have an old Compaq Presario SR1950NX that works perfectly fine, but hasn’t been used in at least 15 years. Obviously I can’t connect it to the internet with Windows XP, but before I recycle it I thought I’d see if anyone had any cool ideas for how I could use it. I’m sure I could find Linux distro that would work, but I don’t really need another desktop PC in the house.
Set it up with netBSD.
Connect some large drives to it and use it as a file server.
Host something on it such as matrix or if you have enough ram a game server.
Use it as a retro game console, a quick look at the specs online suggests it should be able to run PS1 games and older fine.
If you're into home automation, you could use it as a command and control center.
Could be used as a jellyfin server but you'd potentially need to transcode everything in advance.
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It’s an Athlon 64 3800. It has no encode or decode cores for anything, sucks for software encode and decode, and burns 90W to do so. An RPi5 is literally almost three times the CPU performance at like 1/20th of the power budget and would probably run Plex better. Recycling is the best option.
Plex supports Direct Play — no encode/decode needed if the network is decent and the client (like Roku or AppleTV) supports the file format sent by the server.
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My parents have an old Compaq Presario SR1950NX that works perfectly fine, but hasn’t been used in at least 15 years. Obviously I can’t connect it to the internet with Windows XP, but before I recycle it I thought I’d see if anyone had any cool ideas for how I could use it. I’m sure I could find Linux distro that would work, but I don’t really need another desktop PC in the house.
Oh! There‘s probably someone who wants this to play a specific game they have lying around as a CD-ROM. Nerds are like that, always needing the time appropriate hardware for their games.
Yes, I do own a low latency CRT TV to play smash melee, why?
