What are you doing to your old rigs?

I throw my old parts in a box...

wow that was quick!

Give stuff away to friends, or throw it in the rubbish.

Although I do retain CPUs, as I have always done: I have CPUs from every year since 1978, starting with my original 1MHz 6502A from my Ohio Scientific C1P. These are displayed in a series of picture frames, along with details of the chip, on the walls of my study.

I give some away, and some are parted out for repairs.

I have a 333 MHz Celeron as my Freesco router for my home LAN. And I have two 500 MHz P3s in storage: one to be used as another router or web server and the other for a file server.

And then I have a 133 MHz AMD 486 for nostalgia. I want to install DOS 6 and Win 3.1 on it for fun! Yes! I want to track down all those sound, CDROM, and network drivers and install a 3rd party TCP/IP stack in order to access the Internet   And I am REALLY looking forward to playing around with the config.sys and autoexec.bat files to free up 600 K of memory to run DOOM in a DOS box :wink:

I trashed a old P3 450.

My current Athlon XP-M 2600+ and Radeon 9800Pro will be going to my cousin as soon as I build my next PC. While a bit old, it's still a lot better than his older Dell with a 1.4GHz P4 and a 9000Pro GPU.

I stock it away, sorted. I go through a lot of stuff between home and work, and I rebuild machines from parts all the time. I'll find a need for a machine and usually I'll have so many parts laying around all I'll need to build it is a case and maybe a motherboard. Or maybe I have a MB and need a processor. Or maybe I'll need some memory. Typically I can build a machine from spare parts and another $100.

I go through my cache every few years and toss out stuff that will never be used.

Currently, it's dissasembled due to lack of extra monitor, and my uncle is using it's 30Gb IDE HDD and Geforce 2 MX400 PCI on his son's pc, but something happened and it's busted now, the cpu fan broke (celeron 533) and the celery got to 54°C idle, then it was fixed, then I don't know what happened 

Also he had an AMD 386 33mhz machine with 4Mb of SIMM, I wanted it just for fun (y'know a mobo with ONLY ISA stuff isn't an everydays object xD) but he threw it away....*sigh* there I learned the beauty of Wolfenstein

I will give it to my mom, she has a old Compaq p3 400mghz system and badly needs the upgrade. :wink:

Last month I gave away a P4 1.8Ghz system with 512MB's of DDR400 and a Radion 9000 Pro with 128MB's LOL I had alot of fun with that system but I have 4 machines that are way better then that now.

Actually, if I could get my hands on some C-4, I would blow up my old PC on July 4th.

I make file servers, domain controllers, firewalls, exchange servers, and "kid" computers out of spare crap.

I also have a collection of almost one of every apples pc products since the Apple II until the crap they started making at the original iMac's, even a Woz edition IIgs. Still have my original 386sx16, a used 286, 8086, trs-80, sinclair something or other, and some other much older than me stuff. All in my garage of course  

Yeah, me too. Purposely distroying old computers [or anything for that matter] doesn't sit well with me. I don't know how many times I've needed to troubleshoot something and used an old part to verify if the machine was working. Or, a machine will die completely and I can whip up an old machine and be able to attach to the internet or whatever I need to do in short order.

I don't keep stuff that won't ever be used again, and purge my storage every few years so you won't find 5.25 inch floppy drives (well, I did keep one) and a box of 486 motherboards around any more. But, I do have a working K5/2 500 I just reloaded, and tossed out the other 3 I had, after stripping all the CD's and floppies out of them. :wink:

OMFG my name is Greg !!!!!! hi how u doing :wink:


yeah i use my old one for a DVD player  

and some counter-strike 1.6

My wife gets the hand-me-down rig, and then her old one gets cannibalized.

That was thinking ahead! I've thrown too much away and that would have been a great idea. Mother, aunt's and uncle's get all the hand-me-downs. Of course, mine is a hand-me-down as my son gets the high powered rig for all that FEAR and Oblivion.

At work one useless old celeron 400mhz has been transformed into a very useful file server with Gentoo/Subversion/Samba etc.

I still have my Timex Sinclair 1000 and Tandy Color Computer III in my garage. Also, a working eMachines Celeron 2 566 in a closet ready for action. Plus a stack of obsolete parts.

I donate my "leftovers" to friends and familly as I want to avoid being badgered by a clueless buyer that fry something up then want his money back.

I came into posession of a friend's old Pentium 133, which I would've kept using had I not lost the keyboard to it. I ripped the thing apart; if something had screws in it, I went berserk with the screwdriver at it until it was in pieces or I realized that the screwdriver was too big.

In hindsight, I realize I did a very stupid thing in disassembling the PSU.  

I upgrade my old comps to SATA H.D and use T.V out funtion on video card to watch avi files downloaded off the net.

I take out any parts that might have use in a new build or another computer (I have three running in my office). Even a hardrive that is only 3 gig still can contain a lot of word and excel files. The useless stuff left over then goes to a local recycler or becomes a target at the rifle range.

Double post.
Move along, nothing to see here...

sooo true

My old parts go from me to my girl friend....her old parts go to my brother, his old parts go to the garage to play mp3's, the garage parts go on my cd rack to collect dust with the cd's....some parts get stabbed with a screw driver(just old motherboards from asus that sucked to begin with...can a p133 with 512 ram be a router? or is it too slow?... its fanless).....

Since my old rig is mainly "leftovers" from my friends I can't donate them back. Until recently my old rig is sitting on a shelf (without a case) Folding 24/7. (Don't try to recruit me I already have a team). Since I'm moving, its in a box right now, but there's a pic of it somewhere on the forums.

Oh... here it is.

-mcg

how about using them in Grid... use all of there power to do some kinda of processing... just a thought!

I shine them up and sell them to unsuspecting n00bz

Turned my old Dell P3 500 into a nice linux samba server.

Hi Greg, welcome to the party. I've done most of the things listed so far. Some of the earliest stuff I worked with were too huge to keep. In school, a few of us grabbed a big old beast from US Gov't. surplus and parted it out. I still have a chunk of ferrite core memory from it and some beautiful stepper motors. I took apart a board that had a bunch of ICs encased in gold-plated cans. I pried off the can top, impregnated the guts in epoxy and polished it like a mirror. It's fricken beautiful. I've used trashed parts as toys and educational vehicles for the kids. They love taking things apart.

Recent stuff has been kept running as much as possible. I've got an old Compaq with a P3 that is a little clunky but works fine if I need to do bulk CD copying. Of all the Macs we've owned, only one is still alive but it's a beaut - a Power Tower Pro 225 with a RAID0 array. In its day it was top dog. My most recent laptop semideath was a fine 500MHz Vaio with an AMD CPU. It was an excellent machine till our 105 pound Golden pounced on it and broke the mobo. Keys all over the place, delaminated mobo. But I took it apart, straightened all the metal parts I could and did my best to re-flatten the mobo and guess what? It boots! It does lock up at times and can't reliably burn CDs anymore, but it's alive - sorta.

We have way too many old parts boxed up in the basement. I've promised my wife that by the end of summer, I'll weed it out. But assuming I do that, we should be able to find room for a new build... I'm thinking Conroe if the claims hold true. I mean, if I go AM2, we'd be balanced (5 Intel, 4 AMD currently) and people around here would start calling me an AMD fanboy. But with all the price cuts announced lately, AM2 is looking pretty good come to think of it...

THanks guys for your replies, I really appreciates the time spent in answering my query.

For my old rig and 1st PC, HP P3 733Mhz, I gave it to my nephew three years ago. I still see them using this old PC in their school assignments, playing MP3 and low end gaming.

What is becoming an increasing trend is running old computers for the purposes of distubuted computing. This is, in essence, running scientific calculations on your system to aid research.

Many people here at THG use software from Folding@Home. Personally, I run BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing), as do 700,000 others.

Folding@Home focuses on protein structure. The BOINC platform is used by 25+ different scientific research groups for various goals (Climate Prediction, protein folding, film rendering, simulations of the new 27km particle accelerator in switzerland, simulations of malaria spreading, seaching for pulsars, the well known and well documented SETI@Home) and allows users to 'pick and choose' which of the 25+ projects that they can help.

I personally have 3 day-to-day computers running the BOINC software, and another 7 fully committed to the task.

I run the group BOINC@Hull, a small team of 20+ people, and we have just past the 10,000 day computational barrier (equivalent to an 'average machine' ~800Mhz computing for 10,000 days non-stop) in under 7 months. We are currently 655th in the world (Out of 10,000+), and no.1 in the world for one project (Xtremlab) which uses its computational time to analyse the distributed computing software itself.

I fold with most of mine. I have a P3 450 and a Celeron 433 that I need to put back together.

Once I have the new rig, this one will go to my sister.
Hers will be going to our weekend-house.
And the old one (Cel466, 128MB, 4GB) from there will be given away.

i have my k6-2 running the modem, printer, firewall and some backups. when i get dsl, i might change it into a router.

btw, for all you guys talking about having old stuff lying around: i have a 212.6(specifically on the label, it's funny because now they round to gigabytes, they were pointing out a .6 MB then!) MB hard drive laying around (i'm sure there are smaller, but it's tiny), i mean my flash can hold more then that junk!

but i like to keep things! i have several old (pentium) processors, but nothing else for them

my second oldest computer was given to my cousin who had his athlon XP stolen (and realised he didn't need that much processing power)

Ara

Give away some bits, Ebay the rest.

I tried giving it to my parents, siblings, relatives, friends and even try to sell it. And the ones that is not accepted/needed or not sold will setting in the roadside at Wednesday night hoping that someone would snatch it up before the garbage truck trashes it the next morning.

My previous pc is now a cabinet for my important copies of files and documents. Good thing I found a good use for it otherwise it will settings on the roadside waiting for the garbage truck.

Let me give away your crap specs (as much as I remember):
Athlon T-Bird 1GHz
384MB SDRAM
256MB Radeon 9550
HDD: Unknown?
Windows ME (Moron Edition)

Don't throw away that T-Bird; you might get a museum to buy it in a couple years. Or at least give me the rig so that I can have the pleasure of throwing it out a window.

As to what I do with my PCs: My old Dell with a P4 1.6 became the family computer, and I use it when mine doesn't work (which is pretty much all the time). My little brother got the old family computer, which is a very old Dell with a P3 450 and a Diamond Viper V550. That video card was amazing in 1998, and it still plays all of his games.

I usually slim, tidy, undust and clean my old rigs - then sell them as 'beginner' computers. Since I don't change computers that often, and that I usually update them whole, I have little to no problem getting rid of them. If the buyer finds it too slow, I offer to overclock it to what I had it running before, and he grins in appreciation seeing the 20 - 50 % boost he/she gets as a result. Moreover, since I always ran them with more RAM than was usual at the time I sold them, they were plenty fast enough for still-current softwares by the time I sold them.

I obviously don't charge for an overclock.

Example: a slimmed up Duron 950 + 512 Mo DDR + ti 4200 128 Mb + 20 Gb 7200 rpm + DVD drive, sold 180$ without a screen but nicely tuned up can run Doom 3 in a playable manner (the tune-up is manual settings on the DDR, CPU multiplier unlocked and reduced to 7.5 with FSB/RAM bus synchronous at 133 MHz, and slight GPU overclocking).

I'm selling it now, and I have a few clients.

Great Question!

Currently I take my old rigs and set them in a Linux Fedora 4 Cluster and serve my home network off of them. My current rig, does everything else. When I upgrade, I give my parents my older rig, take theirs and add it to the cluster.   It all works out well in the end, and everything still gets used. Currently I have about 10 in the cluster, anywhere from an old p3 to a 2.4 p4. Most have been donated to me from other people, but I keep moving them in and out. As long as it works with everything else, I just keep adding them on.....Makes everything that much more powerful in the long run. God I love RC.....  

I gave my old rig to my dad. He usually plays FS 2004, and some other boring games    
We do some video digitalization thanks to the video card, it has VIVO  

The specs:

- AMD Athlon XP 2000+ TBred
- MSI K7N2 Delta-L
- 768 MB DDR333
- MSI FX5600-VTDR128
- Creative SBLive! 5.1
- LG DVD-RAM GSA-4163B
- Maxtor DiamondPlus9 80 GB ATA133 <---- The fastest disk I've ever had! Even faster than my actual HDD!  

Everything is on stock clocks. Also, that PC has the lowest boot time I've ever seen in my life! 25 secs! That's because of the FX5600. It jumps all the POST screens, directly to the WinXP loading screen 8O

Could you expound on that please? Where do you get the software and what do you process? I'm familiar with folding, but I haven't seen much on grids.

Thanks.

Every new build contains parts cannabilized from the last computer.
The system I now use was built in March. New processor (X2 3800+) and new dual layer DVD were the only new components.
MSI NForce 4 motherboard, hard drive and 6600GT video card reused from December 2005 build.
Ram and sound card reused from March 2005 build.
etc. etc.
As old parts get replaced they go in my supply closet until I have parts enough to build a new computer. Right now I have a nice MSC Nforce 3 AGP motherboard, AMD 64 3000+ (Winchester) cpu, ATI 9600 Pro AGP video card, dvd burner and other parts in the closet.
Need a spare hard drive, ram and OS to make a complete computer, though.
Got an old IBM Pentium II 450mhz computer in storage. Got two empty cases, a spare 350 watt power supply, lots of fans, cables, etc. in the closet.

Every new build contains parts cannabilized from the last computer.
The system I now use was built in March. New processor (X2 3800+) and new dual layer DVD were the only new components.
MSI NForce 4 motherboard, hard drive and 6600GT video card reused from December 2005 build.
Ram and sound card reused from March 2005 build.
etc. etc.
As old parts get replaced they go in my supply closet until I have parts enough to build a new computer. Right now I have a nice MSC Nforce 3 AGP motherboard, AMD 64 3000+ (Winchester) cpu, ATI 9600 Pro AGP video card, dvd burner and other parts in the closet.
Need a spare hard drive, ram and OS to make a complete computer, though.
Got an old IBM Pentium II 450mhz computer in storage. Got two empty cases, a spare 350 watt power supply, lots of fans, cables, etc. in the closet.

Could you expound on that please? Where do you get the software and what do you process? I'm familiar with folding, but I haven't seen much on grids.

Thanks.

google it yourself for now... i'm busy these days (mid-terms), will come back in a couple of days and explain it to you...

I recycle the silicone and put it in breast implants. PM me if you want a pair.

Lol. That's funny! All the PCs I've gotten rid of, put together, have a little over half the power of my current one. They'd be more useful as space heaters than they would be for grid processing. :-)

I take the silicone and use it in discount breast implants. PM me for a quote.

I try to maintain at least two "competent" rigs running. I pass some parts down the line. I recently built a new rig to replace my primary (a 2.4 GHz P4), upgraded its 9200SE to a 6600GT, cleaned it up and gave it to my nieces. Then I built a new "backup" for myself (just a 6600).
The old 9200SE I gave to a friend whose older graphics card was trying to release its ghost.
When parts passed down encounter the brick wall called "the law of diminishing returns," they go into the grabbage, although I've got a couple of boxes of parts I need to sort through. I recently found an old ISA sound card in one such box.
I'm about to build another rig for my sister's family. That will be all new, with few if any inherited parts. They're not gamers, so it's just going to get a X800GTO (at most).
I've been thinking of running BOINC, but just haven't yet. I used to do seti@home, but never re-installed it during an upgrade.

Hey Greg, welcome to the forum.

As for my old stuff, if its from the main system, it goes into the 2nd machine. Stuff from the 2nd machine inevtably ends up on a shelf, collecting dust until I can find a use for it again.

Currently (as far as memory serves), I have the following awaiting re-purposing..

Athlon T-Bird 1GhZ, with 384M PC100.
2x AMD K6-2 500MhZ with ??? amounts of RAM
A small 2 foot high tower of various size HD's, mostly broken
An assortment of internal cards, ranging from an original GeForce 256 to an FX 5200 (Yeah, I know), USB and Parallel addin cards, A few old modems, an old RAID card or two, several broken motherboards and processors (Mainly for components and as part of a wall display).

Theres probably more, but I cant remember exactly what I have around.

Oh, and as a side note, if anyone has an XP 3200+ they dont want, throw me a message, and I'll happily give it a new home  )

Computer chips contain no silicone. I think you meant silicon, which is completely different.

Really? Oh sh*t. I'm so gonna get sued now. My customers will not be happy.