BLOGBloke: This Old PC: 10 New uses for an older Computer
delia
· 2 years ago
hey there bloke, thanks for this great post and a great blog too.
geoff daum
· 1 year ago
Yep - I would agree with that.. Thanks for the line.
Tim
· 1 year ago
I love suggestion #5. My wife owns a mobile DJ company, and it doesn't take a lotta juice to run something like PCDJ or Sax-n-Dotty's. It just take a big external hard drive. Everytime I upgrade my PC, I give her company my old one. It massive overkill (who really needs an Intel Dual Core to essentially run winamp?), but it keeps me in new PCs and her in new computers.
As a testement to being computerized, just last week her office was robbed. They made off with one of her PCs, the three or four CDs laying around, a bunch of mics, and a couple of lights. Unfortunately for the robber (who remains at large), the PC is password protected in the BIOS, the XP username needs a password, and the music is on an external hard drive that she brings home, so while the lights and mics were valuable, the PC itself is pretty much junk. On the bright side, I just ordered myself a new computer today! :)
BLOGBloke
· 1 year ago
Sorry to hear about the robbery Tim. Last year someone torched my car and I never got back the insurance money. What's the matter with these people?
My family inherits my hand-me-down computers too. Just recently my daughter said "I don't want your old computer. I wanna new one". So what I'm going to do is upgrade the motherboard/cpu and ram and keep the old box and screen. I think that's a reasonable compromise. :-)
Tim
· 1 year ago
My wife's old DJ computers get handed down to my kids too, but my oldest boy is 14 now and his friends are starting to play the latest, greatest, hottest video games that my 2 to 3 year old systems can barely handle, so I too may be forced to break the cycle. :(
My wife also owns a photobooth rental company, and last December someone stoled the camera out of the booth. We had it set up in a local bowling alley which had been rented out by a local auto dealership for its company Christmas party. I finished setting it up at 2 in the afternoon and went to the bowling alleys bar to grab a beer. At 4 the girl running the booth showed up to work it. She called me (not knowing I was just upstairs) to ask where the camera was. Sure enough, someone had broke the lock and stole the camera. The bowling alley had cameras, but because we were setup in an out of the way corner no cameras got any clear shots. I didn't really want to refund the rental fee for the booth, so I called around town until I found the exact model of camera I wrote the software for. It ate up the profits of the rental, but at least the auto dealship people were happy. It also taught me to broaden the range of cameras my photobooth software could handle!
BLOGBloke
· 1 year ago
That sucks. Have you considered getting some insurance. Not that it helped me any ;-)
Tim
· 1 year ago
She has insurance, but it has a $500 deductible. The camera was only ~$320 so no use in reporting that to insurance. The computer and mic and stuff that was recently stolen got reported to them though. I don't know how they value computers, but I have all the receipts from when I first bought the parts to make it so if they base its value off that, she'll definately be getting more than it was worth.
ps3
· 4 months ago
yes. useful post. we can use our old pc for many things.we can use it for making network and can play games by connecting the new with old pc.
Hugo
· 3 months ago
What about a pc to play old games. Some games require dos but you can use dos box in order to play them.
Harkirat Singh
· 3 months ago
When trying any new software you can use your old computer if you think it to be ok, then you can use or install on the new one. Children can learn typing etc on the old computers.
BLOGBloke
· 3 months ago
@Harkirat Singh, good idea .. especially for trying out all those buggy Microsoft products ;-)
Encino Locksmith
· 3 months ago
I have a very old Dell Optiplex that I bought 7 years ago. Since then, I had upgraded the ram to 4G, changed the drive to a 320g and wiped the XP for Ubuntu Linux (it crashed and sadly I hadn't the reboot disk or number).
I was thinking of trying to install Windows Vista OS to upgrade it later to Windows 7 later, mainly cuz I want to run netflix streaming and Microsoft Office (legitimately). Is that possible? or is my processor inefficient? Also the hard drive is an old max blastor 3 I think.
BLOGBloke
· 3 months ago
@Encino Locksmith, you might have a problem finding drivers for your old hardware with Vista or Windows 7.
BloggerDude
· 2 months ago
I don't know If I said it already but ...I'm so glad I found this site...Keep up the good work I read a lot of blogs on a daily basis and for the most part, people lack substance but, I just wanted to make a quick comment to say GREAT blog. Thanks, :)
A definite great read....
BLOGBloke
· 2 months ago
@BloggerDude, from a blogger bloke to a dude -- Thanks!
All Comments
As a testement to being computerized, just last week her office was robbed. They made off with one of her PCs, the three or four CDs laying around, a bunch of mics, and a couple of lights. Unfortunately for the robber (who remains at large), the PC is password protected in the BIOS, the XP username needs a password, and the music is on an external hard drive that she brings home, so while the lights and mics were valuable, the PC itself is pretty much junk. On the bright side, I just ordered myself a new computer today! :)
My family inherits my hand-me-down computers too. Just recently my daughter said "I don't want your old computer. I wanna new one". So what I'm going to do is upgrade the motherboard/cpu and ram and keep the old box and screen. I think that's a reasonable compromise. :-)
My wife also owns a photobooth rental company, and last December someone stoled the camera out of the booth. We had it set up in a local bowling alley which had been rented out by a local auto dealership for its company Christmas party. I finished setting it up at 2 in the afternoon and went to the bowling alleys bar to grab a beer. At 4 the girl running the booth showed up to work it. She called me (not knowing I was just upstairs) to ask where the camera was. Sure enough, someone had broke the lock and stole the camera. The bowling alley had cameras, but because we were setup in an out of the way corner no cameras got any clear shots. I didn't really want to refund the rental fee for the booth, so I called around town until I found the exact model of camera I wrote the software for. It ate up the profits of the rental, but at least the auto dealship people were happy. It also taught me to broaden the range of cameras my photobooth software could handle!
Children can learn typing etc on the old computers.
I was thinking of trying to install Windows Vista OS to upgrade it later to Windows 7 later, mainly cuz I want to run netflix streaming and Microsoft Office (legitimately). Is that possible? or is my processor inefficient? Also the hard drive is an old max blastor 3 I think.
A definite great read....