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What Do You Do With Old Computer Parts?
yoyoma writes "I am planning to rebuild our desktop computers. What do other slashdotters do with old computer parts? I would prefer to donate them. These are some old parts that I will end up with: two GA-686LX motherboards with PII 233, greater than 224 MB RAM (the new computers will take DDR), some video cards (Matrox) and possibly two ATX cases with 300 watts powersupplies (looking for quieter, smaller cases). Decent enough, but they will have no hard drives, floppy drives, or CD drives. TecsChange, and this other place accept donation of parts. Has anyone done this? What about the receipts for tax purposes?"
Your local school district would probably be happy to receive the parts. Anything older than that probably wouldn't be useful, but these sound similar to a number of systems (200+) that we donated to the San Francisco Public Schools after our last round of upgrades.
I don't know for a fact that the schools can give you receipts for tax purposes, but knowing my employer it seems a good bet.
Wait... you mean you still haven't joined the ACLU?
There is a store (in Cincinnati, at least) called "Computer Renassance" (bad spelling, I know) that buys old computer parts. It isn't hundreds of dollars for the old stuff, but its cash.
Plus, its nice to buy some old stuff (like 200Mhz motherboard/chip) for linux boxen from the store for cheap...
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
Whatever happened to the one website, either freeboxen.com or freeboxen.net? It was like a ebay kinda site where people put up lists of hardware they didn't need any people could request it. All they typically had to pay was shipping.
I cannibalize like mad. Power supply fans are often good for supplemental case ventilation... provided the reason the PSU is dead is something OTHER than the fan was crap and it overheated.
For complete systems, though, I generally send them to places that ship them off to disadvantaged areas (like Cuba). You don't run up against snooty "What? A PII is way too slow" from there, that's for certain.
Quick tax rebate, Microsoft style: Take your old Windows 95 discs, back them up onto CD-Rs, and donate them. Claim $199 each.
If it ain't broke, you need more software.
Sell 'em! Good God man, tax deduction? Much more problems that it's worth. Keep in mind that you can only write off a percentage of the total value. Hardly worth the effort if you ask me. IF you feel benevolent, then just give them to the local charity or whatever.
Otherwise, sell them to some geek on Ebay, charge a fair price and people will pay you to ship to them.
WTF? Over?
go here: Linux Terminal Server Project
314-15-9265
I dread the day motherboard manufacturers will finally kill ISA slots though ...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
I WISH I had a pII 233...these "spare" parts you speak of are better than my current machine...you should donate them to your local "poor geek" fund....=)
How Jaded Are You?
My friends recently got several (over 10) old compaq laptops (486 style with monochrome display's). They made a sweet video of many ways to destroy them, some of which include burning with gas and rolling over with a truck. We will have it compiled into mpeg pretty soon, and if anyone is interested in getting a copy, gimme an email. :)
override11@home.com
No I didnt spell check this post...
As for destinations - I give local schools and libraries first shot at them.
Just my .02
I like to hang old computer parts on the wall. For a while I had a fully functioning system hanging on the wall.
My evil scheme for world domination is to melt down all those old computer parts and take the gold (and other precious metals). That, and they're really very fun to play around with.
Typing "computer recycling" in google led me on the FIRST LINK to:
The national directory of computer recycling programs
Scrolling down, I found the second link:
The computer recycling center
You can take it from there....
- "When you want something with all your heart, the entire universe conspires to give it to you" -Paulo Coelho
Ok, this sounds like a stupid question...but considering batteries, and engine oil have to be disposed of properly (can't just throw them in the trash)...what exactly do you do with broken hardware that has all sorts of hideous heavy/rare metals and other compounds in it? Can you just toss it?
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
I've made good money selling 32 pin SIMMs I had from the days I was working at a computer assembler : I had a bagfull of 256K and 4M SIMMs and up until about 2 years ago, they sold at crazy prices. Same for EDO DIMM modules. So if you do nothing else, put those 224M RAM of yours in an antistatic bag and enjoy the return on investment in 2 or 3 years. It's not that RAM gets more expensive, it's just that standards get deprecated, therefore more rare, therefore more expensive.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
freegeek.org takes donations in Portland, Oregon. They also teach linux for free and give you a free computer if you complete the course!!!
I'm out like Elian.
S. ALan(TM)
My local community college offers a course for building computers. It helps people understand computer hardware, AND it helps people obtain a useful, low-cost machine.
Components like the ones described by the poster are in demand - reasonably modern equipment, and with a few extra pieces (like drives), the builder can save hundreds of dollars and have a useful and potentially upgradable home PC for the kids.
Other options include the local school district or the local place of worship - whatever floats your boat. Or give it to the neighbor kid who is interested in such things.
The only thing I ask you not to do is to let it rot - by storing it in a closet until it's useless, or by putting it out with the garbage.
right if you want to donate a machine
put manuals in plastic bag along with driver disk and phyically attach it to hardware
(those plastic ties are nice )
this is to prevent it getting lost if they seperate the box from board
FORMAT HARD DISK
(do it with a linux distro for a laugh and root pass =password)
HOW Many machines Have I boot to find letters to tax man porn and such is quite unbeliveable
those 2 steps are really nice
my advice is walk into a primary school with a linux box and X up and running with a edu game on it and the teachers love you (-;
regards
john jones
Their Thrift Stores take old computers and give you a receipt. Not sure about parts, but old complete systems are fine. (Just donatated one recently.)
I tend to store old parts in a pile, or closet. You never know when they will become useful. Someday I know I will need to use that old CGA card again, and you can never have too many 20 Mb drives lying around. You don't know that you won't learn how to fix that old burnt out monitor, and that floppy drive that exhibits destructive tendacies may come in handy sometime. Don't let me get started on my colection of power cords and other misc cables.
By all means keep them around. I've found that an excellent place to keep all this is in large rubbermade tubs under the stairs. Out of sight, but easy to get to when you need them, and also relatively dust free.
Anyhow, does anyone know of a way to get rid of / recycle the really old hardware without paying someone to take it?
I only post comments when someone on the internet is wrong.
Sadly, old hardware is usually best for the scrap heap (well, recycling is better, but you get the idea). It is cheaper to get relatively modern hardware because the difference in operating costs and support hardware (such as power supplies and hard drives) for the older computers mean that fast computers have better bang for the buck.
Even Slashdot wants to hide some things
Check your local geek clubs. UFO (Users of Free Operating Systems) Chicago has a list of its members' idle hardware. I sold an old SCSI drive and video card that I've been holding onto for a few years for just about market value to another UFO member.
I like to play children's songs in minor keys.
"We're all sons of bitches now." --J. Robert Oppenheimer
A lot of my older gear breaks quickly, and sometimes I do it myself. The older hard drives tend to crash, and once that happens, what use is a diskless 386 with 8 mb ram? I tend to take them apart and make stacks of strange computer gear. Two Pentiums that I once had got themselves smashed by crashing everytime I tried to put on Red Hat Linux or Windows. The older and less "used" a system is, the more likely that it will be used in some sort of geeky "experimentation" like hooking it up to a stereo, phone, radio or other electrical gear or installing an obscure, barely tested Unix kernel or alternative OS. This makes it more likely that the poor, over-the-hill machine will meet its demise due to power surged fried circuits or nuked hard disk!
I've got a 486 laptop with a 5" screen. Now what am I going to use that for? Windows 3.1, whew-hew!
Keep some of the useful stuff like soundcards, NIC's, RAM, floppy and hard drives and trash the rest. Never know when that stuff might come in handy. With storage at an all-time low, I can't see too much value in keeping those 500 MB disk drives around; they're just going to crash and make you mad later, anyways. I'd say any motherboard below Pentium is not worth keeping unless you have a lot of patience, an older OS and/or a dedicated task for it to perform, such as routing or firewalling. Even then, the low cost of gear like a Linksys router kind of makes you want to buy something small, useful and well-engineered rather than use an old, clunky x86 with extra NIC's.
Portland, Oregon - FREE GEEK is a non-profit that takes older equipment and makes simple end user Linux boxes (FREEK BOXes) that are given to needy individuals for a few hours of community service recycling computers. The computers come with a class on how to use it and everything. (we've given out a couple a hundred in the last year). http://www.freegeek.org
Usually, my parts wind up going into the boxes owned by various family members. Between me and my mother (who's a Everquest fanatic), the upgrades happen fairly frequently which leaves plenty of spare parts to put in machines for my sister, my young neice and the computers my father uses as point-of-sale systems at his business.
Be nice and see if any of your younger family members could use something that would at least allow them to have 'net access and do word processing. After that, check into donating a working machine (c'mon don't just give them parts) to a local library or school. You may even want to see if there is an after-school activity facility in your area that will take your donation.
If you're just looking to do something with those parts, put them back together, fire it up and get hooked up with the SETI At Home (I don't remember the correct acronym) project, which decodes signals from space using your computer's idle time. Or build a MAME arcade machine. Or generate fractals. The possibilities are endless.
My sigs always suck.
I work for a non-profit group here in Michigan, The Geek Group, that is always looking for donations. We run quite a few classes to teach kids about computers and keeping a steady flow of systems to have them rip apart and learn tends to be a strugle.
akaylor@thegeekgroup.org
http://www.thegeekgroup.org
"The Geek Group is an American based, 501-c-3, non-profit organization with members from all over the world who have been brought together for one simple purpose, to have fun while learning and sharing knowledge for a positive impact on mankind.
We educate the public with fun and interesting science projects. From our Tesla Coil to Geekmobile Unit 3, our projects catch the eye while demonstrating scientific concepts in a fun and interesting manner. In addition to this, we also conduct classes on various areas of computer science, mechanical and electrical engineering, high voltage physics and more.
The Group also offers services to the public. Current on-line services include computer repair and web design. We are also capable of security advising, prototypical design, and software development. We also hold private demonstrations of our projects for schools and other groups.
To learn more about The Geek Group, please feel feel to browse the site. We promise to keep you entertained. Because the Geek shall inherit the Earth!"
I work with teenagers in my spare time. One of our indoor plans for the geekier kids is to take several instances of Pentium I and II technology and apply them to a beowulf cluster sometime during the cold of winter. Not sure what we'll compute, but it should be fun.
healyourchurchwebsite.com - WWJB?
i stil have 486's in use, and my fastest machine is a pii300...
thios parts would definitely be of use to schols, but i don't think they'd be wiling to deal with individual hardware pieces.
the problem is that large organizations (schools, etc.) aren't going to want to deal with building machiensfrmo individual parts, because the administration costs of dealing with a large number of disparate machines can be huge.
The CoyoteLinux distro runs from a floppy and makes an old machine a perfect firewall provided you add 2 network cards and a floppy disk drive, but this should cheap enough regarding the security you'd get.
Trolling using another account since 2005.
I'm not sure if it's a national thing, but when i lived in pittsburgh, there was a place called goodwill computers...accepted donations and provides decent systems for affordable prices. however, the stuff you're talking about ditching is worth holding onto if you ever want to build some test boxes, routers, firewalls, etc...
no, don't curse your schools with surplus hardware!
i could live a little longer in this prison
I've donated crates of old hardware and software to them.
Stonewolf
Recycling centers need help making those "broken" computers useful. The local school needs help getting started with older equipment. If you've got time to donate, please do. Lend your time to institutions you care about. Their needs are suprisingly simple, and once started down the Free software road, they will be able to help themselves. A small investement of your time can save your favorite institution a great deal of money and trouble.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
In spite of the less-than-rosy economic picture, a lot of people are going to buy new computers so they can effectively run Office XP [on which they will only use about 10% of the features]. That just doesn't make sense to me.
How much RAM does Word take nowadays? And don't tell me that memory is cheap and this kind of bloat doesn't matter. It does. People are getting their clocks cleaned trying to keep up with what amounts to a proprietary communications protocol [.doc].
Far from making "kick-arse" machines that can stay current for 12 months. We seem to be entering into an "arse-kicking" machine of our own making.
[ just for fun
I collect old computer from friends and family and just add them onto my network. I have extra network cards and I just put them into the computers I get, install linux, and put them on the network. When I get bored I setup one as a primary DNS server, one as a secondary DNS. I play around with apache and sendmail configs. And even try to hack into my own machines for security holes. It's fun. Old computers have many uses, thanks to linux.
mp3's are only for those with bad memories
The table I am working on right now is made from an old wooden door, covered with a thick blade of transparent glass. The many layers of paint, some of them decades old, were sttripped out almost, but not quite, back to the original wood.
:)
Inside the door carvings there are 5 1/4" disks of various colours, some memory chips, a internal modem, some other unidentified chips, some serail and paralel ports. There are also other raw eletronic components.
The final effect is very good.
if more people would do this, we would have an
abundant supply of capable PC techs in the IT
industry instead of the morons that are now the
majority.
people need to learn to be flexible, and throwing
10 different systems at someone and telling them
to try to install (insert your OS here) on them
will force them to become flexible and creatively
resourceful.
ordering 100 Dells and handing them to students
could never inspire the same sort of learning
experience...
Bravo!!
A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.
Those boards can go up to a PII 366 - heck, you might be able to oc the current CPUs to that, given a large enough heatsink. I would offer to buy the parts myself, but I am on a budget for a house, so that nixes that.
One thing you can do in the "selling on ebay" dept is to sell them as "bare bones" starter systems - drop the boards into the boxes, CPUs, and memory, and a video card each, there you go.
Over the weekend, I picked up an old copier that was sitting out in the desert - shattered beyond belief. Plenty of parts, though:
Nylon Gears
Magnetic Clutches
Solenoids
Toothed Belts
Nylon Sprockets
Stepper Motors
I haven't got much use for this stuff, but I am thinking about cleaning it all up, testing it, then selling it as robot construction parts on Ebay - many of the gears, sprockets and belts are "matched", so would make great driver parts.
My biggest problem right now is staying as clean as I can from the toner!
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
There are lots of programs like Charlottesville's Computers4Kids out there. We'll take any processor at or above 130MHz, drives over 1GB, and other things of that generation. I don't know of any central directory of similar programs, but if there's not one, I know that we'd love to have 'em!
-Waldo
Wycliffe Bible Translaters is always in need of more computers, and they take donations.
No, this isn't a troll and it's not offtopic. It's not meant to spark a religious debate. I posted it so people of this persuasion would know about it. Thanks.
I have three different "levels" of ancient hardware storage in my home office. As I upgrade and replace my hardware, the obsolete stuff slowly makes its way out of my rig, off my desk, and out the door...
Beside the desk:
This is where the old-but-still-usable gear ends up. Looking down beside my desk right now I see several 20, 30, and 40 GB drives, a few CD-ROM drives, and my old mobo and 833 MHz CPU.
In the closet:
My closet holds all of my obsolete-but-not-quite-garbage stuff. Ancient 4X CDRW burners, PII-450 gear, 18 GB drives, etc. Plus a few Win98 retail boxes, heh.
Eventually my old stuff makes it out to the garage in a big scrab box. Every now and then I pour its contents into the garbage. Last dump had some P233 procs and mobos, 72 pin simms (heh), etc. Next load will probably be PII-266 era stuff. PC66 dimms, etc.
The LinkSys 4 port DSL/Cable Router (with built in firewall support) consumes 15 Watts. Wouldn't it be cheaper on electricity than an old 486 setup even if you left the 486's monitor off most of the time?
There are many charities that would benefit from old computers, of the level mentioned, since whatthey have is probably far inferior, however the charities in createst need probably don't have the expertise to deal with parts. Most charities would be willing to accept donations of computers (for office work, etc) but only the technically inclined would brobably be interested in parts. Consider, buying a couple cheap drives and assembling the parts into working systems and donating those. You'd probably get a lot more charities interested in such a donation.
--CTH
--Got Lists? | Top 95 Star Wars Line
One word: Keychain. Nothing says "Geek" like some RAM in your pocket with your keys. SIMMs already have wholes that most of those little steel ball chain keychains fit through, no modification required.
Unfortunately, you could save money (and be more environmentally friendly) in the long run by replacing all these boxes with a single P2-class box.
Bear in mind that running those machines 24/7 uses a fair amount of electricity, and this adds up pretty fast.
I've got an old Mac IIci at home that I've been meaning to do a project NetBSD box on, but have just never gotten around to it because I don't relish the idea of yet another machine I don't need running all the time.
-l
Please list all of the features of Office, and from that list please highlight the 10% of features that people use.
I'm curious if your list will match up with mine. I suspect it won't.
I'm also not so arrogant to think I know better than my customer what features they need.
I probably use about 1% of the features of a typical WP. Which is why I usually use vi to edit HTML documents for my WP needs. Fast, and portable.
Still really irks me. And with the surplus stuff, how about just use it to show very minor things:
"So that's how much pressure is required to stop a motherboard."
"So that's what not cooling a system will do."
"Is that what a bad ram module looks like"
Knowing what bad equipment does is just as important as putting together good stuff.
I demand a million helicopters and a DOLLAR!
We make an email server and put it in the bathroom.
http://blacktop.res.cmu.edu/mailserver.jpg We're still working out some networking troubles but you can try http://bathroom.res.cmu.edu/~tw
And no, a PII 233 is not old hardware. Anything pentium class or even 486 can make a linux server of almost any type.
--------
It's OK to be social, just don't tell anyone about it.
My first year at my high school I helped create a computer club called, F.L.A.T.T. (Forest Lake Area Technology Team).
Our teacher bought various cheap 486s, and whatever parts we could scrap up from varios local schools.
We did so much there. I had already knew a bit or two about computers before then, but this was like a crash course. If we wanted computers for the club we had to build them and get them working with what we had. I had a Mac Plus at home and didn't have much knowledge of PCs, but within 3 months I understood IRQ conflicts, RAM types, processors. I could install Windows 3.11 on a 386 blindfolded with both arms behind my back.
We practiced programming and the club grew. Unfourtunately it shrunk when I left to attend college early. It gave me more computer experience than any other experience so far. It was the best, I learned so much by spending many nights after school trying to get hardware and software configs to work.
The only somewhat mention of our group on the web is at the parrell mac computing site AppleSeed
At my school, we use Norton Ghost on donated machines. This is a program that copies an exact disk image from one hard drive onto another. We just make one master hard disk, and clone a hard drive for each machine. The result is that each computer in a "batch" of donations is identical from the user's point of view, and all the computers in the school have more or less the same "look" to them on the desktop. Slap PolEdit on all of them to keep the idiots from messing with the machines, put Centurion Guards on the machines you don't want the smart people messing with either, and you have a really workable setup in which donated machines are quite useful.
Liscencing isn't a problem, as I said, because we just Ghost a clean drive onto all the machines in a donation batch. Ditto for porn and viruses. In fact, the biggest porn problem comes from teachers themselves (surprise surprise). I spent two hours last friday cleaning a science teacher's computer which was filled to capacity with JPEGs of an - ahem - interesting nature.
Drivers sometimes are a problem, but it's rare we can't find them within an hour of searching on the internet. Since we're ghosting each batch of donations anyway, the additional time required for driver installation is nill.
Regarding proprietary hardware: I've seen computers at my high school that would terrify all right-thinking techs. I've seen computers that were being held together with duct tape, computers with all sorts of proprietary crap - especially compaqs, with the funky square keyboard connectors they used a few years ago - but I've never seen anything in a donation so alien no one in the building could work with it.
My district's budget is a joke - donations are the only thing that let us get enough computers. Every non-department-head teacher computer is a donation, as are all the computers in the programming lab. I don't know what we'd do without people giving us their half-working crap, and our fixing it and putting it in a place it has to be.
Interesting sidenote: You know who gives us more computers than anyone else? Anheiser Bush.
I'm the stranger...posting to
So many Slashdotters brag about how they save money by running a network of old 386s and 486s for distributed computing, etc.
When you consider the electricity cost over time it almost always makes sense to trash those systems and just buy a new high-end athlon or P3/P4 to replace all of the existing systems.
This year, rates went up about 50% from last year. I've cut back to one machine (a server/firewall) that stays up all the time, plus another machine that's fired up only when it's in use. Even with the rate increase, my biggest electric bill so far this year was less than $70.
I sold two of the older machines recently, but still have one computer built up from old parts that sits around as a spare and parts to build another computer or two. The spare was useful when I needed to back up my TiVo recently.
As for noise...you get used to it if you keep a bunch of boxen running all the time. :-)
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
Well there happens to be a WORKING CGA monitor under my stairs, and that 20Mb drive contains an old BBS I used to run. I may want to fire that up in one of the old 8088's I have and make it live on a 1200 baud modem again someday.
Or you can buy a little 3COM dsl/router for $49.
o ol s/item-details.asp?sku=m975-1032
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchT
The Linksys model I have costs about $100.
Both of them include 4 port 100baseT switches, and use NAT to act like a firewall. Unless you need more features than that out of your router/firewall your 486 is just a bif box taking up space and eating electrisity. The processor in the commercial routers isn't likely any more powerful than your 486, so you're right that those processors can still be useful. I'm just not sure the systems are still worth screwing around with. Of course, not stiking them in a landfill is a worth goal as well.
I've donated to Tecschange in the past. Gave them a fairly good Sony 15" monitor (upgraded to a 19" Hitachi). They even came by and picked it up, which was a major bonus for me (I'm carless, so any hauling of equipment anyplace entails a huge hassle). I'm ride of something I used to stub my toe on, and someone, someplace, now has a functioning PC monitor. I didn't bother with the tax writeoff. Recovering the floorspace was enough for me :)
Currently, I seem to have enough computer-needy freinds to make disposing of my recently-used hardware. I just gave my nephews a computer built out of my old hard drive, case, and a failed motherboard upgrade. A freind of mine is going to get my BP6 motherboard after she moves... another may get parts from a gutted server that was replaced with a smaller system.
Ask around, as well. I know several of the IT folks where I work do volunteering for non-profits on the side. I may drag the old 200Mhz PPro out, lash it back together, and give it to them.
Unfortunately I don't have any pictures right now, and my digital camera is not here also. But here are some details:
- The door size is 2m X 0.9m, it was in use when we bought this house. We changed most of the doors, and kept this one to eventually make a table. But many things at our house, including some windows and doors, were found in demolition sites (where you can buy some amazing itens very cheap).
- The glass covers the whole door panel, and is 1 cm thick, shatterproof. It was made to order, not terribly expensive but not cheap also (I don't have the exact price, my wife deals with all this strange stuff related to money:)).
- The table legs were bought in a "do-it-yourself" store.
- At this point there are two CPUs (one in use, one being slowly retrofitted into a new computer from spare parts sitting around) and a monitor on the table.
Just kidding, yes you can donate to a church and then write them off on your taxes. Get a reciept from the church, as you'll need it for your taxes at the end of the year. Alternately you can look at some dealers, like if they were made by HP I think they have a disposal program. They may even take none HP computers. Alternately you could try a place like selling them on a message board like craigslist.org or even ebay. I'd use craigslist, but they are only available (or marketed?) in certain areas AFAIK. I've sold a few items using craigslist.
Only 'flamers' flame!
I should have been more specific. The 'server' I built was added to a network of 3-4 workstations spread around the office. All machines, including the server are shut down every night.
You make a solid point (and I've avoided adding other machines for that reason), but none of the existing desktops could have provided these services due to locations of printers, power, phones lines, etc.
Y'know... just for the record... and I certainly couldn't have spent less money then free;)
Assemble your used parts into web/e-mail terminals. There is no shortage of low income people who can afford to pay $10-20 a month to an ISP, but cannot afford to buy a PC (or know how to configure it afterward).
Ask your coworkers and friends - they probably know people who can use the PCs.
contact techhouse (those people that put tetris on the sciences library at Brown) and we would be (most likely) happy to take it (our server is only a 233Mhz!!!)
yup. =)
It's been done -- stonesoup.esd.ornl.gov has information on the Stone Soupercomputer, which was built entirely from donated parts. It's about 2/3 486 systems, with the rest Pentiums and a couple of Alphas. There was an article in SciAm a while back and it even made /.
But yeah -- if there's nothing else you can think of to do with your old computers, you can always start playing with clustering.
/Brian
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
The article can be found online here
It's a good read, and highly recommended.
-- this
Better idea -- those PIIs you're dumping are pretty nice hardware by any reasonable standard, right? Well...
At some point in the near future I intend to hook up with an old PowerMac 5300. It's got an all-in-one case that would make a perfect jukebox. You could do that too -- maybe you'd have to build a cabinet, but it wouldn't be too hard. I suggest putting a monitor and a trackball in the top of the cabinet and a keyboard drawer and the box itself inside. (Don't know where you'd find a coinslot though...) My Mac jukebox will probably use MacOS 9 just so I can use iTunes (great program), but if I was building a PC jukebox I'd use Linux and LAME or Ogg Vorbis, or even write my own interface.
/Brian
Plus I cant ssh into a linksys remotely to admin my network.
When ipv6 or something better takes over, this wont be an issue. Until then, NAT hacks are de rigueur.
Geeks with Guns
I do everything the voices in my head tell me to...
I was just checking out slashdot and noticed you were asking what you could do with your left over parts..well while I do not have a 501(c) non-profit I do run a non-profitable website from which all the proceeds go towards keeping the site online. So if you have left over equipment I would LOVE to get it =) I'm trying to gather parts to expand as well as build a beowulf cluster to devote to SETI @Home as well as a privately funded seti station we are working on building. I guess a little background - I run The Anomalies Network (http://www.anomalies.net) which is a good sized online paranormal/ufo community. We have over 9gigs of online data as well as over 1300 registered users in our online forum but all in all we get about 3 million hits per month which means its a bear to keep online. We run on either self funded or dontated hardware, and I got really lucky with the bandwidth! Lets see what else - We've been online for over 5 years (I think about 6 years but the launch date escapes me right now..although my wife knows =) and in all that time I earned $45 from the site =) Anyways I would love all your spare hardware (Pentium 1 plus), to make this cluster a reality! It will take time but I promise this is a good cause =) Ok thats as compelling as I think I can be...check out the site and you'll see what I've built. And hopefully you guys would like to help!! Thanks for your time, Olav Founder The Anomalies Network http://www.anomalies.net
Lets consider the cost. Assume an old 200 Watt powersupply. Now, you probably are going to only use 100 watts of that. In one day, that's 2.4 kw/hrs. In a month, thats 73 kw/hrs (2.4 * 30.5). Assume $.10 a kw/h for electicity, that's $7.30 a month. About $87/year.
So, why pay $500 - $1000 for a new server, which will still need to use electricity, when you can take an old 486 or two and use them as a cheap file/print server and a mail/internet server? You don't need the additional speed, so why pay the additional cost?
Here are some good places to donate.
Free Linux CD.org
LinuxFund
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.