New Homes for Old Computers?

[Jerry]

So, does anyone have any suggestions for finding homes for perfectly working but slow computers?

I have a working 300mhz Gateway I'ld like to find a home for or at least someone who is interested in it for parts.

Any ideas?

[Guest]

Is 300Mhz considered so old these days that people just give them away?!?!? Wow....I really need to upgrade my crap.

[Ryan Lintker]

Holy cow!  A perfectly working gateway 300 mhz for parts?  I go home to my parents' pII 233mhz every weekend and I think they will make that one last a couple of more years.

I'm sure that just about any cs student would love to have an old machine of this caliber to play with.  I know that I don't like trying new things on my main pc for fear of it being down for a couple of days when I screw something up.

I'll start the sucking up and begging for that fine machine by saying that I'm sure that it would help get my senior project done in time, in one way or another.

[Guest]

If it has the old ISA slots I could hook my scanner up to it because my scanner is SCSI and the only SCSI card I have is ISA and my computer doesn't have ISA slots. :-x

[Chris Swingler]

Obviously someone hasn't seen my thread about my "new" *nix box :-)

[Peter Motyka]

Hah, my entire computer network in my apartment is made up of second-hand equipment.  A low power machine is perfect for configuring as an internet router.  I have used pentium 75MHz systems for this task and they work great.  Actually, I have been hunting down old equipment lately to use for training.  I plan on attempting the Solaris Administration Certification and went to ebay to find a box to play with.  I was shocked to see the amount of used Sun equipment on there.  I scored a nice system for a decent price and am now a proud owner of my own Sun station :D !

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&category=20328&item=2084201483&rd=1

Peter

[William Grim]

*Wants a new IBM pSeries server.*

/me says in Homer Simpson style drooling scene: *Gurgle grudge* Re-routable CPU power. *Grr.  Gurgle*   Ooo!  And look, Marge!  It's HOT swap CPUs too! *Growl.*

Yes, in true Homer style.

[R. Andrew Lamonica]

I am running Red Hat 8.0 on my 300Mhz (Celeron) Linux Box.  It works great now that I replaced the burned out power supply.  I do need a better hard drive.  My 4GB is a little small and it is being hurt by all the memory swapping.

[William Grim]

You know, Andrew, I never thought I'd say it, but RedHat 8.0 is pretty damn nice!

I still have some issues with RPMs though; I basically think they're crap.

Yes yes, I know they "keep data integrity", but that can be done by better means than making sure you have 500 RPMs to install your one RPM depending on stuff.

Other than RPMs though, it's rock solid.

Oh, and it passed the "mom test".  I installed it for my mom, and she likes using it more than Windows now.  She especially like mahjong, solitaire, and the internet.

Later everyone!

[Peter Motyka]

Try out the apt-get port for RedHat.  It is really nice for resolving dependencies and such.  You can find it at http://freshrpms.net

Peter