In today’s technology pace a computer is considered old after 2 years. In fact in the company I work for we have a policy of equipment retirement of 2 years for laptops and 3 years for desktops, and I’m sure most companies follow similar policies also. In this post I want to discuss some ideas on how still get the juice out of that oldie. Read on.

If the computer is still usable you can use it as a print server or media server. Most families now have multiple computers at home sharing an Internet connection with a wireless router, so if everyone uses the same wireless router the computers can talk each other. To setup the old computer to talk with the other computers, you will need to connect it either using a network cable or a wireless adapter to the same router the other computers connect to. Then you will need to hook the printer to the computer using a USB, Parallel port or Ethernet cable, then install the printer drivers and share it out to everyone. In this setup, everyone will be able to print from their own computers. Another thing you could do if everyone in the family enjoys the same type of music, is to setup the computer with music files. Windows media player and Itunes support sharing music files to remote users. You will need to copy all music files to the computer hard drive, install windows media player or Itunes and set it up to share the music library.

If you have multiple old computers that are still usable and you are curious about how certain things work like networking, file sharing etc. you could set a small network for testing. 2 or 3 computers should be enough to setup a small testing network. What about getting your hands dirty with Linux? Some people are afraid to use Linux because they think it is only for geeks or it is too complicated for them; those are only myths, if you can use windows, I’m more than confidant that you can learn Linux in a short time. Linux will run happy on a low end computer because unlike windows Linux uses fewer resources on the system.

Donate the computer to charity, school or poor people. Yes, we might be in a technological revolution but there are people that are still not there yet and need help to get started. Donating a computer to a poor person could be really helpful for the person and spiritually rewarding for you. Some people can only afford for their daily breathing, and having a computer is a dream. I in fact got my first computer as a donation from my sister in law. It was an E-machine that used to restart by itself now and then, but that’s how I fell in love with computers. Here I am making love with them now.

Don’t want to play with them; don’t want to give it away? Ok frank here is another thing you can do. Use them for parts. Yes, every computer has something good, a CD ROM, a hard drive, processor, memory, Power supply, system case etc. you can use these part to repair a newer computer, or increase the performance. This is what we normally do at work-fix the computers still in production with retired equipment. It saves money and makes our life more enjoyable by giving us something fun to do.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, May 8th, 2008 at 3:58 pm and is filed under How-To. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.