What to do with old workstation?

[Mloot]

My mother-in-law's pc is an old Compaq workstation with 2 P4 Xeons (2.4ghz), 2gb of RAM (Rambus, I think), and a Radeon 9600 Pro video card. She is running Windows 7, and many times she runs out of memory, especially when she plays games on Facebook. Frontierville can sometimes be a memory hog. This slows down her pc quite a bit. There is not much I can do to upgrade this machine, as all 4 RAM slots are populated with 512mb modules.

I recently upgraded my kid's homework pc, and have (leftover) an X2 5600+, 4gb ddr2, a motherboard, and a spare case and power supply. I will be throwing in a cheap video card, and this should last her a while, considering she is not a heavy pc user.

If you guys were me, what would you do with the workstation? Other than the RAM limitation, it runs fine, and it seems a shame to throw out a working rig.

 

[Arik5405]

If you guys were me, what would you do with the workstation?

pr0n.

 

[gevorg]

donate and write-off in taxes

 

[antisocialmunky]

Put it in a really nice looking case and attach a 27' monitor to it and use it to troll people who come over.

That's actually still a fairly decent rig for day to day stuff. You can give it to a friend or something.

 

[mrjoltcola]

I wish I could give you advice.

The only thing that causes me to sell / junk an old workstation is when I start running out of outlets to plug them in, or when my wife points out how much we are paying in electricity. Then I usually don't get rid of it, I put it in a closet. I still have some really old machines.

You might consider throwing Linux on it and learning a new OS. Linux is very efficient memory-wise, and comes with all sorts of languages, kits, etc. There are Linux spins for different areas of interest, such as electronics / circuit design.

 

[Vic Vega]

Certain distributions of Linux are efficient memory wise if they have been compiled to be... just like any operating system.

I would probably give it away and tell MIL to pick up something newer.

I just gave away a S-A (AthlonXP 3200+ @ 2.4GHz) box and a S-939 (Opteron 185 @ 3.0GHz) box I literally had no use for. I used to use them as lab boxes but now I just run VMs on the box in my signature.

There's always folding if you're into that. I got bored with that some time around 2006 or so...

 

[Cerb]

With RDRAM, I would look at places like EDealInfo and Red Tag for good newer computers (yesterday's deal at red tag, FI, was a slim tower C2D 2.4 w/ 2GB DDR2, 80GB HDD, 1xPCI-e 1x, 1x16x, 2xPCI, Win7 Pro, and even had a DVI port for the IGP, for something like $170).

 

[mrjoltcola]

Certain distributions of Linux are efficient memory wise if they have been compiled to be... just like any operating system.

Compiled really doesn't have much to do with it, at least since Linux went to a dynamic module system. It requires much less memory than Windows Vista or Windows 7. Linux can still run in 256MB of RAM without swap, probably right around Windows XP (another reason for XP on old hardware).

The point is there are some neat Linux distributions out there for diversion, and at the same time they can breathe new life into old hardware due to the reduced memory requirement.

 

[jhu]

Donate it. There apparently are still families in this country who still don't have computers.

 

[cantholdanymore]

Donate it. There apparently are still families in this country who still don't have computers.

True, but you need to give it directly to these people. I just recycled my absolutely perfect HP Pavilion (circa 2005) because it seems that no charity organization wants to deal wit 5+ years old computers.

 

[fastamdman]

I would either sell it, set it up as a file server + folding on it, or just fold on it...or....ya either fold or sell it

 

[infoiltrator]

Goodwill here usually takes them. Sometimes the Salvation Army will.

 

[pitz]

I used to take machines like these and turn 'em into home file servers. However, with how energy efficient the new machines are, it hardly seems worthwhile. An i5-2400 setup with RAM/CPU can be bought for as little as $300, has great embedded video, and without HDDs, can idle down as low as 25-30W. A double Xeon machine, likely 200+W just at idle, no drives.

With electricity costing $1/watt/year or more these days, saving 150W by going to a modern, energy efficient platform, by far, outweighs the savings of free hardware. And the i5-2400 platform can very likely virtualize practically anything you need to run in terms of additional desktops.

Plus the performance boost is nice!

10-year-old Crapaq hardware, send it to the recyclers and don't look back!

 

[Sunburn74]

Best thing to do with old PCs? Donate to local libraries and write off for taxes. Library software can run on etch and sketches and they need PCs that are cheap and not overkill.

 

[thelastjuju]

I'd install a fresh copy of XP over it, and turn it into an HTPC for my bedroom's TV like I did. Clone my media drive onto it, and let it even serve as a backup drive while also being able to watch all my ripped videos off it

Possible even use it as a means to try out a Linux OS..

 

[sm625]

Disable aero and that will help with memory usage.

 

[gmaster456]

Disable aero and that will help with memory usage.

It will do little for memory when a dedicated card is already installed.

 

[VirtualLarry]

give it away

 

[jhu]

I used to take machines like these and turn 'em into home file servers. However, with how energy efficient the new machines are, it hardly seems worthwhile. An i5-2400 setup with RAM/CPU can be bought for as little as $300, has great embedded video, and without HDDs, can idle down as low as 25-30W. A double Xeon machine, likely 200+W just at idle, no drives.

With electricity costing $1/watt/year or more these days, saving 150W by going to a modern, energy efficient platform, by far, outweighs the savings of free hardware. And the i5-2400 platform can very likely virtualize practically anything you need to run in terms of additional desktops.

Plus the performance boost is nice!

10-year-old Crapaq hardware, send it to the recyclers and don't look back!

ROI of buying a new system vs. getting a free system for home file serving will take many years. Dual Netburst Xeon 2.4 GHz is going to be 130 W max TDP. A Core i5 2400 is going to be 95 W max TDP. So worst case scenario we're looking at a difference of 35 W, so let's go with that. Where I live, it's about $0.06 /kWh. If both computers are using their processors at full blast 24/7 for 1 year, the difference is 306 kWh for the entire year. That comes to $18/year. Break even point is about 16 years before the $300 spent for the Core i5 system is returned in energy price savings. Of course the CPU in a home file server is usually at or near idle most of the time so ROI is going to be even longer.

 

[pitz]

Best thing to do with old PCs? Donate to local libraries and write off for taxes. Library software can run on etch and sketches and they need PCs that are cheap and not overkill.

As I wrote above, even a 'free' PC is more expensive than a paid-for one, unless they run around and power cycle everything down after-hours. Add in maintenance costs of that (relatively obscure) hardware (ie: having to come up with a seperate boot image, weird video drivers, etc.), and libraries might not be as enthusiastic as you think.

Doesn't hurt to try though...

 

[pitz]

ROI of buying a new system vs. getting a free system for home file serving will take many years. Dual Netburst Xeon 2.4 GHz is going to be 130 W max TDP.

That's max TDP. The new CPU's have significantly lower idle states. The i3/i5/i7 platforms, with SSD, can achieve total system draw, including (embedded) video, as low as 29W. A 'workstation' type machine from 10 years ago is typically looking at a minimum idle in the 200-250W range, if not more, especially with dual Xeons.

Its not just the CPU you need to worry about, but all of the accessories as well. By the time you add in the idle load of the video, the SCSI controller, and whatever else, it can be fairly significant. The Sandy Bridge platform is pretty much the greatest thing since sliced bread, on x86, for reducing power consumption.

A Core i5 2400 is going to be 95 W max TDP. So worst case scenario we're looking at a difference of 35 W, so let's go with that.

For a given workload (file serving, desktop usage, whatever), the SB processors will sit at or close to idle a far greater portion of the time than would, say, those 10-year-old Xeons. I don't think your comparision is all that reasonable.

Where I live, it's about $0.06 /kWh. If both computers are using their processors at full blast 24/7 for 1 year, the difference is 306 kWh for the entire year. That comes to $18/year. Break even point is about 16 years before the $300 spent for the Core i5 system is returned in energy price savings. Of course the CPU in a home file server is usually at or near idle most of the time so ROI is going to be even longer.

Where I live, its around $0.11/kWhour, at the meter. There are additional line losses, plus that old PSU in the 'workstation' will be significantly less efficient than a new-build/optimized supply. The actual consumption delta I suspect is around 200W, which, at $0.13/kWhour, is $228/year, or, in many cases, a payback period of under 2 years. In other words, the net present value of keeping such an old machine in service 24/7 is less than zero, at anything but extremely high discount rates.

 

[jhu]

Where I live, its around $0.11/kWhour, at the meter. There are additional line losses, plus that old PSU in the 'workstation' will be significantly less efficient than a new-build/optimized supply. The actual consumption delta I suspect is around 200W, which, at $0.13/kWhour, is $228/year, or, in many cases, a payback period of under 2 years. In other words, the net present value of keeping such an old machine in service 24/7 is less than zero, at anything but extremely high discount rates.

I had an Athlon 64 with Radeon 9200 and an 80 GB hard drive. That thing pulled 50 W at idle based on my Kilowatt meter. I have a hard time believing 200 W idle even for a dual Netburst Xeon workstation.

 

[Arkaign]

Yeah to boot the 2.4s weren't very power hungry. They got appreciably more thirsty past the 3ghz barrier though.

 

[aigomorla]

pr0n.

+1

NAS duty or personal DNS for porn.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

I could've missed this as I scanned the history of posts. Oh . . . there it is, in fact . . . AigoMorla just posted one.

WINDOWS HOME SERVER

You could consider this in a trade-off between convenience and power-bill, but if it has any different power-states at all, you should be able to keep it "on-line." With mine, I simply left all the motherboard settings at default with EIST Enabled.

I'm pretty sure that WHS will install on that generation of CPUs. The drivers are identical or synonymous with those for Windows Server 2003 (32-bit WHS) -- probably for a later server-version with the newer 64-bit WHS.