What NOT to do with your old computers
Posted on February 3rd, 2008 at 9:49 amWhy not throw away your old obsolete PCs when you can re-purpose them as a file/print server, firewall or some other single-purpose appliance? People have been doing this forever–at least since about 1988, when those old dual-floppy IBM 5150 PCs started getting obsoleted by PCs powered by Intel’s 386-based processors, and businesses were installing Ethernet-driven, Novell-powered LANs.
What could be more sensible than to re-use older PCs that aren’t fast enough to use for desktop computing anymore? It’s far better than simply throwing out the old machinery, which is full of toxic waste. I’m as guilty as anyone of promoting the idea of re-using old PCs for this kind of thing, but I wonder why people are still promoting it, as in this article, “Simple Home File Server (Based On Ubuntu)”. I love HowtoForge, but this is kind of silly for home/family users, and here’s why:
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