What should I do with my 10 to 15 year old desktop pcs?

Rene — Sat, 18 Jan 2014 12:08:35 +0000

Hey everyone I wonder if you could help me out. I am currently at my parents home and there are some old pcs from the time when I was young (even my first very on pc is among them). They might have been bought between 1997 and 2002 and have single core processors starting from 333 Mhz going up to 1800 Mhz. Memory is also varying between 64 MB to 1 GB as is the hard disk. Those computers need way to much energy, the fan is really loud and so on…
In general the electronic parts of these computers are still in a good shape and they have served a good purpose for a long time. I can imagine many use cases yet looking at ebay you would only be able to sell these computers for 1 euro each.
I kind of refuse to give them away for free or even worse trow them away. But apparently these computers are worth nothing. Which sorry to say this again I refuse to accept. Computing power is an amazing thing.
Does anyone have a cool idea what one could do with them? Maybe install some lite weight Linux and use them to control some hardware or investigate some networking projects. I even considered using them as a file / backup server but this also seems not to be a good idea since the energy consumption as mentioned above is too high and network storage devices which you can buy nowadays seem to fulfill the service much better.
I tried to google for the problem but I only find boring articles without any good ideas. So if anyone of you had some idea this would be highly appreciated.

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What should I do with my 10 to 15 year old desktop pcs?