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What to do with an old PC?

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It shouldn't be too hard to find one: just ring up your local council, and ask if they have a PC Recycling program: if they do, you'll find one there.;)

sorry for the double post but see PC recycling programs what are they i know you can get rid of an old pc that way but can you get stuff for free from it or what?

i know that some company's looking to upgrade give pcs away for cheap because they have depreciated in value so much they make a profit from selling it so cheap. My bro had a job a few years ago and they just sold all the dell pcs to the employees for like £3 or something unfortunately he couldnt get one because he used to ride the bus to work and couldnt get one home.
 
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you can get a nVidia GeForce FX5500 256MB PCI for £25 on ebay or a GeForce 6200 128MB DDR PCI for about £20 or so

either of these cards would suffice in a system like that and they are both PCI
 

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you can get a nVidia GeForce FX5500 256MB PCI for £25 on ebay or a GeForce 6200 128MB DDR PCI for about £20 or so

either of these cards would suffice in a system like that and they are both PCI

true. both those would overpower a PCI bus (as in, the bus would hold them back) but at the same time they will be more than enough for such a PC.

With a video card like that (they have advanced DVD decoding hardware) the box would be capable of playing DVD, MPEG and (most) DivX based movies - anything that wasnt HD.
 
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true. both those would overpower a PCI bus (as in, the bus would hold them back) but at the same time they will be more than enough for such a PC.

With a video card like that (they have advanced DVD decoding hardware) the box would be capable of playing DVD, MPEG and (most) DivX based movies - anything that wasnt HD.

yeah it could play almost any dvds or video that wasnt at too high a resolution

i was wondering if those would be help back by the PCI slot, i dont think it would be too much but for such a cheap upgrade it could turn a piece of junk into something useful

Id like to have a box that i could fath about with linux on
 
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Ok, he'd have to get a DVD drive for it. But yeah, with XBMC, or a done-up Windows 2k, a small LCD monitor, and a "decent" graphics card, and a smaller case, it should make a good media PC!
 
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kyle2020

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why not have it as a music system / downloading unit? If its quiet and low power consumption it could be a 24/7 downloading beast! :D
 
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If I gave my friend my currently useless 120 watt Mini-ATX PSU, found a small case for it, and had my previously mentioned upgrades, it would work quite well!
 
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kyle2020

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exactly! once my spinpoint F1 arrives im setting my old media center PC up for DVD playback, music and to be a 24/7 downloader. Like you mentioned, mines bloody silent too.
 

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i just got my 24/7 download box finalised... plan to make a thread on it soon actually.
 

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My friend has an old PC he got for free.
It is a LEADER branded PC, and he was rather exited about it, until we booted it.
When we saw the Windows 98 startup screen, we new why he got it for free.:ohwell:
However, he still wants to make something of it.
Specs are below:
CPU: Intel PIII Celeron, coppermine, Socket 370 @ 733 MHz
RAM: 160 MB (128 + 32), SDRAM @ 66 MHz (133 MHz Capable)
Motherboard: SiS 630S based, single chip solution. 3 PCI slots, inbuilt graphics. No AGP slot
HDD: 9.3 GB IDE, very noisy
CD: 52x CD drive
Network card: 10/100 Fast Ethernet, 56k Dialup Modem
PSU: 350 watts of unstoppable POWAAR!:laugh:

So, what should he do with it? Its easily expandable, very quiet (excepting the hard drive), would run on a very low power system (I have a mini-ATX 120 Watt PSU lying around), and would probably fit in a shoebox. I'm thinking of a small media center, with more RAM and a better HDD + W2K.
Any other ideas?
Firewall appliance based on PC hardware IPCop
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It shouldn't be too hard to find one: just ring up your local council, and ask if they have a PC Recycling program: if they do, you'll find one there.;)

Heh, PC recycling program... that doesn't really exist back here^^
And people selling such PCs want a ridiculous amount of my precious cash...
Well, guess that means observing eBay a little longer^^
 
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Personally, I'd spend say $20 on a discreet case, and set it up by your PC and run a lightweight Linux or Windows OS (nLite springs to mind), and use it to browse from the comfort of your sofa :)
 

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cdawall

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what bus speed is that celeron you might bee able to pin mod it higher and turn it unto a useful computer
 
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well i got my 20x dvd burner for £20 it does dual layer too.

all you need really tho is a quiet dvd drive quiet cooling and one of the graphics card i mentioned since you dont have an agp slot

that small form factor power supply should be fine with the cpu and everything else

i take it the motherboard has a ide cable connection for hard drives if so you can find really cheap ones on ebay it should cost musch to get this pc running

about £40-50 to get it running, you could skip the new hard drive or see how cheap a dvd drive you could get but youd need to get a top pci graphics card fortunately these would be a fx5500 or a 6200pci costing around a pricely sun of £15-30

XBMC ??? Media Centre is only available on xp and vista? i guess thats not what your talking about tho.

xp could run on it but you need a os that will run faster to get maximum efficiency so linux or windows 2000

LOL Windows ME the disaster OS i cant believe some people had that OS it was like a deformed windows 98 that was ducked taped to try to be 2000 with a million faults and bugs
 

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what bus speed is that celeron you might bee able to pin mod it higher and turn it unto a useful computer

The Celeron runs at 733 MHz, with a 66 MHz bus speed. (Hurah for CPU-Z!)

@ MilkyWay: XBMC was a very lightweight linux distro that was made for the XBox, and was an excellent media player that could play almost any format: It has no relation to Windows Media Center, but it can run off of a bootable device. I just need to find out whether it can be installed...

@ MRCL: whats the Swiss address for eBay? I'll help you look for something if you want.:)

What would be the best internet browser for this machine? Firefox or Opera?
 
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my friend had a xbox 1 with mods and imsure it had other hard drives crammed into it so it ran a custom bootloader and could run programs and images of games and linux
 

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The Celeron runs at 733 MHz, with a 66 MHz bus speed. (Hurah for CPU-Z!)

@ MilkyWay: XBMC was a very lightweight linux distro that was made for the XBox, and was an excellent media player that could play almost any format: It has no relation to Windows Media Center, but it can run off of a bootable device. I just need to find out whether it can be installed...

@ MRCL: whats the Swiss address for eBay? I'll help you look for something if you want.:)

What would be the best internet browser for this machine? Firefox or Opera?

pin mod the thing to a 100mhz FSB 1.1ghz P3 celeron should do great as a MCPC
 
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could possibly do a voltage and bsel(fsb) pin mod, but would it run at 100x11?
 

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could possibly do a voltage and bsel(fsb) pin mod, but would it run at 100x11?


overclockers online said:
Overclocking

Because this CPU has a really high multiplier, I didn't think it would overclock at all, but once again you can't be sure about something untill you try it yourself. I managed to get this baby up to a rather amazing 990Mhz (11x90Mhz @ 1.8v) with a retail Intel cooler. Not bad huh ... Still, I wasn't satisfied with this result and furthermore I was interested to see if I would be able to get it even higher. And higher it is ..

I didn't manage to get it 100% stable at 1045MHz / 1.95v with a multiplier of 11x and a FSB of 95Mhz and when using the Golden Orb instead of the retail cooler. With a little more/beter cooling I'm sure this Celeron will do 1050Mhz with ease. Also, there isn't much doubt these Celeron 733 CPUs will run 1Ghz right out of the box.
OK, so far the overclocking part, now let's see how this CPU reacts on our torturing, shall we
http://www.overclockersonline.net/?page=articles&num=29

it should do just fine

now here is the vcore mods
http://www.extremeoverclocking.com/articles/howto/CPU_Voltage.html

still looking for the bus speed mod
 

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Cool, it looks like you can create a bootable flash drive for XBMC.
I'll do that, except using a CD! How would I install it though?
linky for me please
 
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linky for me please

I think this is the right place...
http://www.xbox-hq.com/html/article845.html

My friend is going to case-mod it...

Into....



A Shoebox!!:laugh::roll::laugh:
He loves the idea of a computer fitting in a shoebox.:cool:
He'll probably buy a little LCD screen to put on it, a DVD drive, and I'll help him find a PCI graphics card, and maybe a PCI wireless card. All in all, it should be a cool n' quite media PC/Web-box!
 
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