What use for my old 32bit machines? Suggestions please!

[zarathustra]

Hi
since I made the switch to AMD64; suite of three machines, laptop, desktop and dual cpu box I have a few rather high spec AMD XP and one dual AMD MP box sitting idle.
What on earth can I use them for? Seriously, I have one sitting as a rather excentric router! and I gave one to my daughter but the rest whilst fast for their time are now paling in comparison to the 64bit boxes. Although they all have the edge on my new desktop as I'm having major problems with that, but that's another story.

They can be novel or downright wasteful but anything to shift em really....Go on cheer me up, please?
Regards zara

[hairymunky]

a server for BZFlag

[Nigel]

Donate them to your local school to try to encourage them away from Micro$oft

[fingers99]

Give em to me!

[guy]

There are charities that find badly-needed homes for unwanted PCs. They are especially desperate for decent modern kit like yours.
Anybody know a good url?

[mugstar]

http://www.communitytechnology.org.uk/, if you're anywhere near London.

[nordle]

I bet those XP's can out perform even your dual opteron! Go on, grab a copy of cluster knoppix and set up your own local grid
http://bofh.be/clusterknoppix/
why.....mmm.. because its possible, and kernel compiling in 1minute sounds good, or actually install gentoo in less than 30mins, I wonder if UT2004 would run over a cluster?

Or actually make use of http://distcc.samba.org/

Or, perhaps a bit of both, donate a box if you think it would be more use to others, then keep one back for taking online backups of your linux and win32 box's (if you've got both). This software has a web interface and, for me, takes backups of changed files every hour from 2 windows + 1 linux box, just users home files.
http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/

Or spend £60 on a TV-Card, maybe underclock the slowest unit, lower the core voltage, get a silent cpu heatsink+fan and setup a PVR. MythTV, or if you prefer, kaffeine is excellent and now supports streaming media / broadcasting across the network. So you could get a wirless card, stick the box in the loft / anywhere out the way, and broadcast your DVD's, DIVX, OGG, DVB data to other PC's in the house.
http://tinyurl.com/2t62t
The windows software for this card is terrible, hideous, just plain nasty, thankfully kaffeine and MythTV are far better.

[towy71]

nordle could you perhaps use http://tinyurl.com/ for long links like the ebuyer one then the message board will render nicely

[tomdeb]

The PVR idea is a good one.

but you can also :

- build a wireless gateway and share your bandwidth with your neighbours
- snort your whole network into mysql
- contribute to internet anonimity
- build an enemy territory dedicaded server

and of course always boinc the best of you

[nordle]

nordle could you perhaps use http://tinyurl.com/ for long links like the ebuyer one then the message board will render nicely

Done Thanks for the link, there's a Firefox Extension too.
https://addons.update.mozilla.org/exten ... php?id=126

[towy71]

yeah go nordle