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What to do with a free 1.8Ghz Celeron computer?

Safeway

Safeway

Lifer
A few months ago, I bought my grandparents a new computer -- a Dell Core2Duo Vostro and 20" widescreen monitor for ~$450. This replaced their old eMachine.

eMachine stats:
1.8Ghz Celeron
2GB RAM
80GB HDD
Fresh WinXP SP3

What would you do with this?

(Please do not say trash it unless you would actually trash it. Selling it is a possibility, but I'd like to re purpose it.)
 
Donate it to a church or school.

You can write both of those off on your taxes for a few bucks at least not much though.
 
Put an nLited XP on it, and give it to anyone in the family that doesn't currently have a computer or needs a computer to learn.
 
tellya what u will do w/it
put it in the closet til its %100 obslete
then ull throw it out
if i were you id pull the ram and boot the fuckin thing across the room
 
I'd probably trash it.

if I needed a 2nd desktop, I already have the hardware laying around to build it (and better than a celeron).
 
Originally posted by: Gibsons
I think I'd throw a blue ray drive in it and hook it up to my TV. Does it have a video card?
Click to expand...

That computer is probably waaay underpowered to play back blurays without dropping frames, even with a potent video card.

OP, I'd personally trash it, as it is probably an inefficient machine (electric-bill wise) to even make a storage server out of it. I don't see it doing anything more than wasting space in the house personally.
 
Originally posted by: Special K
Originally posted by: tasmanian
Use it. Or sell it on craigslist as a gaming pc for $500.
Click to expand...

I don't think you would get anywhere near $500 for that.
Click to expand...

You normally cant, but with good enough advertising and getting lucky. Someone stupid will buy it off craigslist.
 
Originally posted by: amdhunter
Originally posted by: Gibsons
I think I'd throw a blue ray drive in it and hook it up to my TV. Does it have a video card?
Click to expand...

That computer is probably waaay underpowered to play back blurays without dropping frames, even with a potent video card.
Click to expand...

If the computer has PCIe slots, put in a Geforce 9400gt card and it'll do Blu Ray perfectly. I had a 9400gt in a Celeron 1.8 at one point. It barely touched the CPU while playing Blu Ray. Everything is offloaded.

If it has AGP then its worthless for that purpose.
 
Originally posted by: amdhunter
Originally posted by: Gibsons
I think I'd throw a blue ray drive in it and hook it up to my TV. Does it have a video card?
Click to expand...

That computer is probably waaay underpowered to play back blurays without dropping frames, even with a potent video card.

OP, I'd personally trash it, as it is probably an inefficient machine (electric-bill wise) to even make a storage server out of it. I don't see it doing anything more than wasting space in the house personally.
Click to expand...

Believe it or not we did use computers for things before quad cores and sli video cards. Just because a computer isn't dual core 3ghz does not mean it is useless.

Many things you can do with an old pc.
Use it to run another OS like linux to get experience with the OS without having to mess with your current pc.

Run it as a server and firewall or router for the home network. They can also do things like virus scanning of files as they pass through the network and content filtering or ad blocking without having to run anything on the connected pc.
Better than any router you can buy without spending several hundred dollars.
http://www.pfsense.com/
http://www.freenas.org/
http://smoothwall.org/



Use it as a media player with XBMC.
http://xbmc.org/
Put in a good nvidia based card and use it with the linux XBMC that now has GPU processing to offload video from the cpu.



 
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