2 old computers

I have adopted 2 old computers, one is running windows 98, has the memory of an 85 year old senile man and will not do alot. That one is proberbly best for the bin however the second one has 512 mb of memory, and 80gb hard drive and is reasonably good for just plodding around on tinternet. I was going to take the memory and add it to my PC however the slots are all full, the hard drive would be a welcome addition to my existing 80gb drive, do I just plug it into the cable which connects my existing HDD? There are two of the connectors which i presume one would be the master and the other would be the slave, it currently has a copy of XP on which will need to be wiped and a new copy (of which i have the disk) put onto it. Is that all i need to do or would there be more?

Any suggestions as to what I could do with these computers would be appreciated

You shouldn't have any problem putting the second hard drive in. Depending on the age of the system, the cable position determines master and slave or you have to set jumpers.

Easiest way to check is to count the conductors on the cable. If there's 80, the position, if there's 40, you have to the jumper settings and make the new one a slave. You might have to switch the jumpers on your current drive as well. Some of them need a different setting for master when there's a slave present.

Each manufacturer has the jumper info available on their website if there's not a diagram on the label of the drive.

I use my old PC as a fileserver/BT-download-machine... it runs much cheaper than anything with modern hardware so I have less regrets leaving it on all day or even through the night. And it does a fine job downloading stuff via BT and sharing movies with my other computers.

Dump a decent linux distribution on it and you'll be fine. I always used this program as well, it's a bit old and doesn't support all the new shiny things bigger ones do but you'll get the idea

http://torrentflux.com/

i use an old P3 1.266ghz as a fileserver/bt download machine altho i have upgraded a few bits on it here and there,does what i want it to do and it can even manage a few games from 2003 and earlier


P3 1.266ghz
1gb of sdr pc133 ram
geforce 6600gt
80gb hd + 40gb hd

a lot of ppl bin old machines but they can be usefull ,if nothing else they r good as a backup pc if your main machine croaks.

even the older pc u have u may get a bit for the parts on ebay if u split it up,amazing wat some ppl will buy tbh.

This post has been edited by xu: Apr 1 2008, 04:54 PM

I think that the older computer will be decent for surfing the net.. I just sold one laptop for 50euros ($78/£40), 450MHz Celeron with 160MB RAM and 4,3GB HDD, I had installed puppylinux into it, and now it is serving my mother in law for her surfing needs.. Paying the bills and reading newspapers and shopping from the net... Java is also working in it, but it is really slow on that.. The puppylinux made miracles on the startup and shutdown speeds, also it is really simple system to use.. The configuring and installing extra stuff into it was not that simple.. 'tho I think she wont be doing such things, firefox and messenger is all she'll need. For now at least..

The newer computer would prolly serve you well as an extra computer, that's on your bedroom, playing mp3's and webradio and surfing the web.. maybe even buy a tv-card into it, and so you would have a bedroom tv... I have one Pentium4 1,6GHz with 768MB PC133 SDRAM that has 20GB HDD and a DVB card. The computer is using ubuntu 8.04 alpha6, and running well. Because of the tv card I bought a cheap 22" widescreen LCD on to it.. And I gotta say, that it has been really worth the money. All in all I maybe payed 350euros for that bedroom tv-multimediacenter and here in stores 22" LCD-tv's cost from 400e and up.. and those cannot play mp3's or surf the web or save the tv-shows to HDD or read DVD's or understand divx/xvid codecs.

if you are just going to add the second 80GB hard drive to your existing computer for the purpose of extra storage you only need to format it and not actually install a fresh copy of the operating system. You can format it through windows itself by right clicking on the drive after it has been added and clicking format (prvoiding it is not in the master spot or the hard drive that the operating system is being loaded off of). I myself would use the install disk to windows to format the drive though as i have found it to be more reliable in my experience as an A+ certified computer technician. in oreder to do this install the drive in the slave position and boot the computer from the cdrom. most newer computers are setup to offer you the chance to boot from cdrom before booting from the hard drive, however should yours not be you would have to enter the BIOS and change the boot order. Once in the setup on the cdrom you will be given the option to format drives and also create partitions should you desire. if you should decide to format the drive using the cd method be sure that you do not either format or delete the partition on your C: drive as this will cause you to lose everything on your original hard drive.

One of our old ancient cronks was used for a long while as an mp3 jukebox by the kids