Derek Smithies wrote, On 12/05/09 15:36:
So what do you do with the old computers that one tends to acquire?
They are "old" so the hardware is borderline for reliability, so there is
not much point in putting lots of time in them to making them do big
important jobs.
Gut them for useful spares, dump them at molten media if they're too
useless or faulty.
An old computer as a fileserver - will work, but when it fails the
blood pressure goes up (the kids want their videos to watch) and it is
not good.
The WAF is poor - they don't seem to appreciate when their videos are
not available....
fileserver yes, maybe. Bit limited on ram, so is a bit slow.
firewall - yes, the throughtput is low cause ADSL is quite slow. But I
only need 1 firewall and I have "lots" of the old computers.
Do two firewalls with carp failover and heartbeat... there's another one
used.
Hmm, - two computers + some planks of wood and we have a respectable
shelf.. Just a bit big.
And surprisingly not that strong.
What about a really exotic use?
Some custom software, custom hardware, use the computer power supply and
we could have a really high speed battery charger..
---Does anyone know of such a project ?---
ATX PSU as a bench power supply.
Dead hard drives as weights for gluing things in the garage.
Fans and decent heatsinks can be used on all sorts of things.
I once cut down an ATX case because the box needed no drives (firewall).
Comment??
Power - old stuff can do the job, but two old PCs will use roughly
double the power of one new one, and handle less load.
P.S. In fact, the most common use for old computers is to take up space
in the garage.
Be ruthless.
--
Craig Falconer
