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What to do with an Old Win 2k PC?

TxGoat said:
How to build your own Arcade System


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Awesome
 
Hardware firewall seems like such a waste of electricity heh. Isn't that want the router is for? :D Am I crazy?


That MAME thing seems pretty sweet, not a half bad idea. I am going to look into donating as well.

I got the other PC up an running with Mint and XBMC now, so we'll see how that goes. Gonna test an old ATI all in wonder card in it. Not sure if it can handle HD movie content over and SMB share even on a small monitor.
 
Oh and for the record, I think I have you beat. I have a Pentium 75 in the garage that came installed with Windows 3.1 I think it is loaded with Windows 95 right now. I use it to store my auto-detail products on top of. :D


And that's another idea....make a geek's end-table out of it if it's a tower....All you need is some glass to mount it on. I bet that would fetch more than selling it outright.
 
Lol - for S&G I could pull out my old Gateway2000 486SX (that I upgrade with a 486DX2 CPU that would only run at 50 MHz since the mobo was hardwired to only run in increments of 20 and 50, so I could not run at the full 66 MHz) which is where those 72pin DRAM modules I mentioned above came from :D

I wouldn't tr to use that for ... anything. hell, my DROID can out last that ancient monster lol
 
Haha... It's really scary. On the news one night a year or so ago they mentioned that blackberries have more computational power than the on-board Apollo computers! :)
 
It's actually true - the on-board computes on the friggin Space Shuttle, for a lot of the (?) telemetry data and history, were using DOS. Seriously.
 
Hahah.. Wow. Should have at least put on some unix. I think unix makes it much easier to approach light speed. I think I read that in the man page somewhere.
 
But the wireless driver for the Space-Cantana isn't yet finished. If they had the device, they could delay the launch, but who knows when Pringles and "SPACE" will release the driver source...?
 
:) I suppose that space missions aren't probably top priority for the old win 2k pc? :)

Back on topic, well, I think the pc aquarium idea was pretty cool. And I do like the idea of using as a media pc as mentioned above (stream audio around).

OH. What about hooking it up to the Internets, get some RSS feeds to it, and use one of those marquees to display news?! That'd be pretty cool. Though, the marquee probably doesn't need a pc for that. I'm not sure, I've never looked into those before.

Yeah. Do it! Get a marquee going! ;)
 
heh - I have a post around here somewhere (I think it was from Lifehacker) on how to convert an old LCD to a digital picture frame.

Same concept should also work for marquees, right?
 
heh I think I'm just gonna get the box up and running, dban it and toss WinXP on there maybe then donate it. Then keep my other old gaming rig as the HTPC (wannabe)
 
The gaming rig should be OK for Media PC. The CPU may not handle HD that well. 720 probably ok but 1080 will really struggle I think. I have an AMD 64 at around 3GHz (I think?) and I have to terminate a lot of processes to make 1080 run smoothly.
 
Yeah I got Linux Mint 11 on it and XBMC, and it definitely struggled a bit playing 720 content.

It was one of the first Athalon x64s and I think it's clocked at 2.0 Ghz but they call it a "2600" because that was the beginning of the downfall of the Ghz race....

I wonder if I put a top of the line AGP card in there, and a faster processor if that'd be enough.
 
Actually, your HDs (unless they're either SSDs or else 10K drives) are probably going ot be the biggest bottleneck here.

I'm guessing you've got 5900 rpm IDEs in there, right? Probably not even Ultra DMA 133, either, more like UDMA 100s ....

Or did that board come with SATA 1st gen?

The reason I say that is that, while your RAM is limiting you, your HDs are limiting you more b/c of all the paging it has to do to keep up with the demand for the 720 content and OS and I/O of a general nature.
 
^above post was about the old gaming rig

I have two 76 GB raptors in there (10k RPM) I *think* they are second gen, but not nearly as fast as anything today. My (current gaming machine) 7200RPM 1TB Samsung spinpoint F1 drives smoke them like no one's business.

I tried striping them but the ubiquity installer in Mint 11 does not likey them thar RAID controllers. I ended up switching the controller into regular old SATA mode. Which is fine for now. I may use some kind of software RAID.

I also have 2x 200GB 7200RPM drives for local storage -- Old Western Digital drives I think.


Basically I built this rig top of the line when Half life 2 came out..... for obvious reasons :D
 
oh. Whoops. Lol.

You caught me dead to rights - I thought it was about that older PC. Thanks for setting me straight.
 
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