As a dork, I accumulate a lot of old PCs. Once Kim and I moved in with each other, I took many of them to Goodwill. She was right, there was little reason to keep them collected in the office.
Currently, I have just 3 crap PCs, having given my konked out PowerBook to mray for spare parts. Each of these machines has minimal specs as they’re all several years old, some have broken screens, and there’s something “wrong” with all of them.
What I’ve found though is using Windows on old boxes is impossibly tedious. As tedious as using Linux: you’re always hunting down drivers and trying to figure out how to configure things in Windows 98, 2000, or XP. Good luck getting them to talk with Macs out of the box: that’s a TV-pipe dream.
I have an ancient Compaq — Kim’s old machine actually — with just around 184 megs of RAM and an AMD K6, 499 MHz processor in it running Windows XP. The thing runs like crap. I have no memories of how XP got on it, but it’s clearly gotten to the state where I need to re-install Windows to clean up whatever crap the machine has running through it’s arteries.
The problem is, I have no idea where my XP CDs are. I cleaned out the pile of CDs I’ve stacked up over the past 10+ years last spring, and I’m sure I flung out some XP CDs thinking to myself, “you don’t need these anymore, Mac-boy.” How annoying is that for me?
The problem is, XP renders a box that old useless. So it seems like the only thing to do with the box — aside from throw it out — is slap Linux on it. From years of home IT chatter with mray, I know Linux will run just fine with a crap box like that, and I can at least do something with it to nickel-and-dime out more value from the box instead of just Goodwilling it.
Yeah, the only problem is trying to get people who are used to Windows to accept that Windows will give the old girl a heart attack and *nix is just the only thing that'll let her live out the end of her days in peace.