Sup Sup Forums
I have an old PC with the following specs:
Intel Pentium 4 @ 3.00 GHz
256 MB RAM
40 GB HDD
Currently running Windows XP SP1
Any ideas on how to use it other than salvaging the parts or giving it away? I was thinking of experimenting with Linux or using it as a light duty computer for playing music and maybe watching videos. Are there any Linux distros that would run decently on this configuration?
That's pretty much junk op, best take it to e-recycling place. Would be useable with a lot more ram, though.
Windows 95
Puppy Linux
Install Debian minimal, and then download openbox + tint2 + thunar over your internet connection.
cdimage.debian.org
This or lubuntu.
If the machine has survived all these years it is a surviver that will work for many years still. My mail machine is 12 years old and just keeps on trundling. I updated with more RAM but that is all.
It will still do whatever it did when it was new, including what you said. If you don't care for messing with abandonware it's will run a minimal Linux/BSD setup just fine.
It's a turing-complete system that can compute anything that is theoretically computable with the power of equipment that people once considered worth six figures, get creative.
upgrade it to 1GB add a 256MG agp card or a PCI-E 512MB video and just install Dos games and old windows 2000 games and shit
Its good times :)
But because its pentuim 4 make sure to to cool that cpu real well.
Op I tried one of these projects. Waste of time. It is good if you want to learn Linux basics through getting hardware to work.
I tried several distros like Puppy and other minimal ones.
Once complete it will run very few things properly. You need a lot more RAM to be able to watch movies and use it in general without it grinding to a crawl.
Recycle it, and find a used one on Kijiji for cheap, that has better specs, if you like the idea of the project.
most of those have pretty standard hardware, but what kind of competence should we really be expecting from someone who only uses their computers as a glorified chromecast
windows 95, windows 89 and windows NT all run on 256MB or lower.
Not sure abour windows 2000 it doesn't work well under 512MB
>Not sure abour windows 2000 it doesn't work well under 512MB
given that 2000 shipped when 128MB was the standard I would say the problem lies elsewhere
I'm talking about fully patched versions
not day 1 machines and since when would anyone run a unpatched machine.
my grandma gave me her old Dell with similar base specs. I was bored one day so I threw in a new IDE drive, 2GB of RAM, 256MB AGP card (scavenged from other dead PCs I had) and Win7. All its drivers were working at first boot. It was good enough for shitposting, Jewtube and older vidya.
not really sure what difference that makes, 2K SP4 will run just as fine on any system that shipped with vanilla 2K
Upgrade the RAM (Probably SDRAM, maybe DDR1) to at least 1GB, 2 if possible, and it will run any modern distro just fine. Forget about browsing most modern websites with more than two or three tabs open at a time without blocking JavaScript tho. You should be able to get the RAM cartridges for free or dirt cheap from Craiglist/Freecycle/ebay/etc. Try and see if there is a computer club or Linux user group close by, they will hook you up. Maybe ask in local computer stores to take a look in their parts bin. You may be able to also score a better processor (more cache, perhaps a dual core).
I also ran a minecraft server for four people some summers ago with a much worse computer, and it worked fine (PIII, 64MB of RAM upgraded to 192MB).
>windows 89
*98
That machine would run OpenBSD really well.
Old games if ur into that. On the plus side, the hardware doesn't have built in CIA spying into it if you wanted to browse the interwebs with Linux. Use a text based browser
At the very least, save the Windows XP product key. Those are getting pretty hard to come by these days. If you don't want it....I'd be happy to take it off your hands.
It's not like you can't install Debian on it and do things with it, but it's pretty much useless. Even a Raspberry Pi would be better spec-wise, and uses a hundredth of the space and power.
I used a computer like this as my main PC for about 5 years. Before that I had even shitter PCs. You have the better CPU, but I had 2GB RAM. I recommend at least 1GB for modern web but other than that it's still fine. The CPU is still good enough for playing 8 bit 720p anime. I used it to write some novels and make $$$ and buy my current PC.
If you just want to use it for SOMETHING just download mechwarrior 4.
And if it has a CRT monitor on decent condition, give it a try for gaming or video. Those can be real nice. GPUs up to the GTX 900 series support DVI-I/VGA
If you do end up chucking it, harvest the heatsink. The pentium 4 was a toaster, and back then the cooling solutions were no joke. Literally a copper slab as standard, things that are found on more premium coolers today, and in smaller amounts.
Seriously this. Raspberry Pi has basically made old junk computers obsolete as boxes for fooling around on or home server use unless you need x86 for some reason.
>just USB my shit up fampai
the RPi is trash for hipsters with no imagination or personality to speak of
And yet it is better than OP's computer.
What an odd configuration. 256 MB RAM sounds very little for a PC of the P4 3 GHz era. Did you remove RAM from it at some point?
>RPi = $40+
>P4 = free
Yet you'll save that on the electricity bill in about half a year.
>Kijiji
dafuq
craigslist for leafs
Except the RPi uses a single USB 2.0 lane to connect all four USB ports and the NIC to the SoC itself, which makes it utterly pathetic for absolutely anything storage related unless you're fine with speeds so terrible that a remote VPS will take a massive shit all over it. Sure, P4 systems do suck in the era of extremely cheap K8 and Conroe systems, but that doesn't make the RPi any more capable.
480 Mbps USB is enough to feed both a 100 Mbps NIC and a hard drive to fetch the data from, though.
What motherboard it has? you could up the ram to 2GB and add a GPU (if AGP get anything over a GF6200/ATi X1300) so you could at least play youtube videos at 480p and use it as an old console/MAME box, it should easily be able to play anything under N64 graphics (maybe PSP with some tweaks)
>At the very least, save the Windows XP product key.
google.com
Use the p4 to start a housefire
>>Intel Pentium 4 @ 3.00 GHz
What the hell for?
Don't forget your thermal paste, your house might burn down.
for many tasks it certainly can be, but for many others? either is good, a big old box can be even better as the appeal to novelty of delving into an older, unfamiliar or nostalgic environment and making it useful again is a far better motivating factor than anything a cheap little Pi most people just throw in their drawer can offer
those chips only have like 80W TDPs, they were merely inefficient for their time when everything else was typically 60W.
a typical P4 system is no different from the average Sup Forums rig you'll see in a speccy thread at worst
The difference is that the PC is 15 years old and the thermal paste probably has never been replaced.
You're not coming anywhere near 480 Mbps when you have a single controller juggling every port on the computer though.
Ontariofag detected.
All the light linux that I've seen that would work as well speedwise as xp etc. are really weird working linux. They tend to run in ram. They're interesting and a good way to get some use out of an old machine but really crap for an intro into linux.
If you want to get into linux try vm's or better yet just get a small ssd and try it out on your regular machine. More fun than vm's anyway and more useful as you get into it.
Play some ancient PC games on it, lots of dudes over at /vr/ would blow money for an authentic setup like that.
win2k uses ~60M by itself, 128M+ is fine
>I was thinking of experimenting with Linux
I tried this before on old hardware similar to yours, two different distros would not render font at all... just garbled pixels (maybe they didn't like my AGP card or something).
That was years ago though, and good luck with drivers if you decide to go that route!
that would be about as new as you could go while still supporting win95 well, though you might as well go with 98SE instead since you can
just wipe it with a fresh copy of TinyXP (if you really want to use XP) and take it off the internet. Then load it up with classic games, maybe dual boot it with a lightweight linux or something too. That's all I would recommend. Keep it because pretty soon these machines are gonna be pretty expensive on eBay, so you could make a couple hundred dollars off of it.
>best take it to e-recycling place
so many people like you missed out on the cash from the nostalgia market booming right now with this stuff.
so replace it for pennies, that's not a big deal
even if you don't, shit's not going to light you on fire regardless
>thermal paste replacement
I've been using some computers for over 10 years 24/7, and I've never ever had a problem with this. Please kill yourself.
Make it a loli porn seedbox
use as a heater in winter
longer bibeline 8===========D
Fuck off, nobody gives a fuck about your "is my old shit cool yet?" posts
Windows Vista is your best choice.
Not my old shit, I just recently got it for free. It's a decomissioned computer in excellent shape and I'm looking for useful things to do with it other than throwing it away or salvaging the parts.
Actually good and helpful advice. Thanks.
>Intel Pentium 4
Install Temp... wait...
>256 MB RAM
Install gentoo and CDE
1. Upgrade memory to 1+ GB as already suggested. Without that, you can basically forget about most online stuff, and using a 100 watt P4 just to play MP3s is pretty stupid.
2. Check the CPU support for the mainboard. You might be able to put a 65nm Core 2 Duo in there (5 bucks on ali/ebay) - with that and 2 gigs of memory it becomes a fairly decent web browsing machine.
Leave it running Prime95. Makes a good spaceheater.
Old computers are also useful as firewalls. I have a relic running Smoothwall. It is scary to see the reports generated about all the attacks it stops. You will need 2 Ethernet ports.
Cram a Geforce 6800 in it and you have a retro gaming machine.
get a meme trinitron, a model m and a microsoft intelli 3.0 (or 1.1) and play vidya on it in the most comfy way possible. im pretty sure it can run any DOS game out there.