What to do with an oldish system

[airis2001]

I just bought back an AMD based 1.44ghz T-bird system with 1 gig of ram, ATI AIW radeon (original) and no HD (yet) Any ideas as to what i can do with it? I have Snapstrem Beyond TV and the Snapstream TV card in my other system, so I was thinking media server. If I did that i would get a basic card to replace the ATI card with something a bit better (the card in my current system) Any other ideas?
Thanks

 

[Cassius105]

if your into gaming you could put win98 on it and use it as a retro gaming box for those old games that wont run on modern OS

 

[DaveSimmons]

If it's really just a media (= file) server, anything beyond onboard video will be fine. If it's only going to serve files you could also sell 512 MB of the RAM. Just get a PCI drive controller and load up on 160 - 400 GB drives. If you want a new case the Antec SLK3700AMB is great for a file server.

if your into gaming you could put win98 on it and use it as a retro gaming box for those old games that wont run on modern OS

That's also a good idea. I'm currently dual-booting my FLAC music server, with Win2K for server use and Win98SE for old games like The Longest Journey I can't get to run properly under XP even with compatibility mode.

 

[airis2001]

I was thinking I would need the ram since i would be using the system to record and recompress TV shows (beyond TV)

 

[DaveSimmons]

Originally posted by: airis2001
I was thinking I would need the ram since i would be using the system to record and recompress TV shows (beyond TV)

That's mostly CPU not RAM, so keeping 512 MB should be enough (but check beyond TV's recommendation in case it's a memory hog).