I’m not familiar with your skillset or interests but a bunch of old PCs can be an amazing way to learn from. A palette worth of 90s office pcs pulled from a dumpster is how I ended up learning how to build a linux server in the early 00’s. Teach yourself PC building by putting the best parts together in one machine. Learn overclocking, try out linux/bsd/plan9, or create your own webserver. Keep in mind, these boxes are going to consume a lot of power for the performance you get. Don’t worry about breaking things. Now’s your chance to make mistakes.
The case and fans are good to keep around. You can convert the power supplies to quick and dirty (emphasis here) dc bench supplies with fixed voltages. If they have ide drives that still work, you can use them to mod original xboxes. I will always keep heatsinks for other projects. I usually have a bunch old Dells in my closet to rip parts off of. As you build up a parts collection you rig up stuff for your main PC over time. For example, My main case only had 2 3.5" drive mounts so I unscrewed a 3.5" bay from an old Dell case and rivetted it to my main pc case.
You can convert the power supplies to quick and dirty (emphasis here) dc bench supplies with fixed voltages
Even better, they sell premade lab bench modules that can be hooked to DC power supplies and come with buck converter and current limit, for about 20€. Awesome use of old power supplies.
Use them to play minesweepeer without adds
You can take apart the hard drives to get some really strong magnets for your refrigerator. You need a torx bit screwdriver. I think it might be a t7 bit. The hard drives are likely failing anyway.
Unless you have like a thinkpad t60 or x60 or t400 or x200. The computers are probably not worth using.
video of the magnets https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=156L_QtJ_I0
On the topic of like repurposing various computer components. I used to see people using the circuit boards for like art projects or decorations. Maybe that’s tacky.
Maybe having a bunch of DVD-R drives could be useful if you want to burn a bunch of DVDs at the same time. That’s if these computers even have burner drives.
$WARNINGthere is 1 part of the computer that you don’t want to take apart. PSU power supply unit. The PSU has high voltage capacitors inside of it, that can shock you and kill you, even if the computer is off. The PSU is a small box near the back of the case. It should be safe as long as you don’t open that box. There’s probably a warning sticker on that box.If you do feel brave to take it apart, with a 5-15 dollar board you can use those as a really good DC power supply for whatever project you’re working on.
Actually just google atx break out board, thats just plug and play and you don’t need to touch it.
their compute probably isn’t worth the power consumption but a windows xp machine can be useful for if you want to run any mid to late 90s software that doesn’t cooperate with modern systems and isn’t emulated properly with dosbox.
outside of selling the parts to retro computing enthusiasts, nothing really
put them in a cross shape and revive him
Unless you’re a real computer whiz probably not very much. If the HDDs are SATA you could use them but they’ll be really slow and not offer much storage. Everything else will either be incompatible with modern tech or significantly slower/smaller/weaker than what you would need for even basic tasks.
Edit: some scrap parts might be useful like the cases, fans, screws, mounts, etc.
do they have buckling spring keyboards?
No keyboards, i just have the computers
look up the cpu’s and gpu’s on ebay, some models they are worth a lil for nostalgic value but otherwise it’s scrap metal recycling.
I have 1 computer like that, I picked it out the garbage. I use it to keep something else off the floor (basically as a table). I think I turned it on once to see if it worked and it didn’t but I couldn’t be bothered troubleshooting (which I know nothing about). Because I have not been able to think of a plan for it.
Before getting rid of it I will probably remove the floppy drive, modem and any cables/cards that look like they might work in my next oldest computer. Ive never needed a floppy drive in many years but maybe I could one day. If you dont already have an optical drive, its good to have one around so try to figure out one that works and is comptabile with modern computers.
Also might be worthwhile to look up the model numbers in case they were really nice or specialized 20 years ago, there might be something in there. But if its a 2005 PC for running MS Word like mine, only of interest if you have literally nothing to do and a passion for this kind of thing and are a mascochist for frustration.
Remove the ram, the motherboard, hard drives, CPU, and the aluminum cases and seperate them into piles. You get more money that way.
Also the older the computer the more gold and other precious metals it tends to have.
Are they from a company? Maybe naming conventions and passwords.
Could see if there’s anything fun on the hdds but that’s about it
I still have a PC with parts that were made before 2006. Its only real uses are:
- Transferring content from a DVD to a flash drive
- Transferring content from a floppy to a flash drive
1 is only applicable to me because none of my other computers have functional DVD drives.
You can make a retro LAN party!
You can pull the lasers out of the dvd drives just make sure to remember that only one of the two lasers is in the visible light spectrum most of the time
