Desktop PC with XP, anything cool?
 

My mom was getting tired of going between her Mac and the ancient PC for work stuff, so I put parallels on her iMac and it's now running Lion and windows 7.

Anyways, I just reformatted the hard drive on the PC to get rid of the legal transcriptions and software that were saved on it.

Is there anything cool to do with these late 90's units? Turn it into a DVD ripper? Toss it off the roof? Put an amp head in the tower and take it to gigs?

old pc+ baseball bat = anger management

Why not turn the PC over to places that could give them or sell them to the less fortunate, instead of needlessly destroying them?

Actually thats a pretty cool idea, then if you could turn the CRT monitor into a little 1x10 cab... Dude, you'd be like hipster Jesus.

The thing barely ran. It was only used for typing in the WordPerfect program. It actually just quit reading the formatting disks halfway through the cycle. It wouldn't read disk 6 out of 8, so I just turned it off... I'd be surprised if it even starts up tomorrow.

I remember waiting 3 hours for the thing to open the Internet browser way back in 2002 haha.

Dude... I have a gig in Portland next month. I may just have to do that.

Old computers are worthless and the only thing to do is donate them to the electronic recycler so they don't end up in a landfill.

Until recently, I had kept every PC that I've ever owned, on the theory that if it still worked then it was wasteful to get rid of it (and you can't give them away). Then I realized I had a dozen computers taking up space in my home for no reason.

Donate it. It's probably not fast enough to use most of the current software, or even to surf the 'net well. It could be used to teach people to use a computer as a word processor, etc without heavy video application.

Load it with a dozen GTX-660s for bitcoin mining :D

I've also seen people use those oldschool towers as disguise cases for high-end PCs so at first glance you'd think it's just a clunker but when you look inside it's top-end stuff. Course you'd have to watercool it and/or be handy enough with a drill to make your own fan vents.

Most places where I live will not take them anymore.

I would wipe the hard drive, reload the OS and stick a larger hard drive in it and use it as a storage backup on my home network.

Classic pc games. Just load 98se on that thing, and run old dos/dos4gw/win9x games on there that won't run on new hardware. If not that, then just load it with mame and a half dozen other emulators and run it to the tv with some usb gamepads hooked up to save wear and tear on any older gen consoles you may have.

oohhh,....I have a mame with super mario....I may have to hook that up to the tv!!!

Old games is a good idea. I have this old frankenstein computer that is built out of parts of three or four different desktops. It has a pentium 4 and three random hard drives, and I use it as the music server for my house.

A modder or gamer's PC from that era might have a useful case or PSU, and perhaps a fan or two. Mom's PC? Kill it with fire.

Reformat is not good enough DBAN that drive. Then open it up and harvest its rare earth magnet.

Make an old video game ROM emulator out of it?

put lubuntu linux on it and then donate it

Kinda beat me to it.

I was about to suggest trying out tiny linux distros on it, things even smaller than Lubuntu like Puppy Linux, Slitaz, Slax, Tiny Core, etc.

I took the Power Supply out of an old tower I had laying around and turned it into a bench top modular power supply for experimentation (it has 12VDC, 5VDC and 3VDC(?) options, all with quick connect terminals and LEDs. ). I then kept the empty tower, took off all the panels and the faceplate and house my old CDs in there. Looks kinda cool.