Old Dell 8200

July 28, 2008 11:46 AM

What to do with my old Dell tower 8200? I have this Dell 8200 Pentium 4 2.80 GH 512mb 128GB hard drive that is in good working condition that I no longer need. Can it be used as a movie storage, data storage or what are your ideas?
posted by robbyrobs to technology (11 comments total)

You could set it up to only deal with media, playing as well as storage.

If you have a business it could be dedicated to that.

If you have a kid you could give it to them so they don't tie up the family machine.
posted by theichibun at 12:33 PM on July 28, 2008

Getting a USB HDD enclosure would make a nifty USB drive. Otherwise sell parts on eBay ^_^
posted by vanoakenfold at 12:39 PM on July 28, 2008

It would make a decent iTunes server: install Firefly Media Server, and iTunes will find it and stream from it.
posted by scruss at 1:01 PM on July 28, 2008

LinuxMCE?
posted by limon at 1:13 PM on July 28, 2008

...am slightly confused as to whether you have a computer or the hard drive from a computer. Assuming the former:

- Media servers aren't hard to set up and give you a nice way of watching movies and the like. The hard drive is plenty big enough to do something I've always wanted to do, which is rip my DVD collection to a media server so I can play them without having to go and fetch the actual disc. Ubuntu is a nice distro and fairly easy to use, or you can use Windows. Google "home media server" for plenty of ideas.

- Donate processor cycles to folding@Home or some worthy project!

- Set it up as a network file server -- again, I like Linux with Samba if you want to talk to Windows. That'll let you set up backups onto the server or store files there. I have this set up on a computer downstairs and use it for exactly that.
posted by katrielalex at 1:29 PM on July 28, 2008

P.S. http://ask.metafilter.com/74924/Possible-uses-for-idle-XP-box
posted by katrielalex at 1:31 PM on July 28, 2008

Put it through a kill-a-watt and verify that whatever you're going to use it 24/7 for is worth it for your pocketbook?
posted by bertrandom at 2:55 PM on July 28, 2008

If you go the media server route, it's well worth leaving aside a bit of hard drive space for backups from your new machine - I use rsync to copy all my work and financial records files over to my media server machine every night, and after a hard drive failure on my laptop, this really saved my bacon.

But as bertrandom says, running a computer if you don't really need to is expensive/environmentally dodgy, so recycling or donating it might be the best bet. Which reminds me that I don't really need to run my own spare computer ;-)
posted by jack_mo at 3:29 PM on July 28, 2008

I was in the same situation last year with the exact same machine. I considered all the options listed above, and eventually sold the thing. My inner geek salivated at the power and expansion options, but in the end, a new mac mini will do twice the work and use half the power.
posted by limited slip at 4:00 PM on July 28, 2008

> but in the end, a new mac mini will do twice the work and use half the power.

Keep in mind, however, that if the alternative is buying a new computer, the new one will have a "manufacturing debt" or "handicap" to overcome: energy is required (as well as many other resources, e.g. clean water, carbon) to manufacture a new computer. That should figure into your mental calculations if environmental impact is a concern.

The decision is very similar to deciding whether to continue running a used car that you already own, or to sell it and buy a brand-new but more efficient one. (Cf. this AskMeFi.)

Unfortunately, manufacturers aren't required to disclose the energy that goes into producing a new machine, so at best you'd have to use a rough estimate. This page quotes this site, which in turn references this paywalled IEEE article, claiming that the manufacturing process for a new computer is roughly equivalent to running that same computer, 24/7, for 10 years. (The article is dated 2004, so it's probably years of a P4-era computer, not a modern high-efficiency one, either.) That's a fairly substantial debt/handicap, and it would make me at least consider running the old machine for a while as a test, to see if you really need it (and will need it for long enough) to justify the purchase of a new machine.
posted by Kadin2048 at 9:44 PM on July 28, 2008

Donate it to people that need it more than you do.
posted by jozzas at 10:26 PM on July 28, 2008