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After you have toddlers mod the tar outta it...it can make a stylish paperweight!it makes a great boat anchor!install windows ME, 98, 95, and 3.1 to have your very own museum!

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I'm surprised that everyone forgot about upgrading the memory.I've found that you can easily add more memory to an older computer to make them run much faster. Often I just have an electrostatic baggy of that old memory laying around and just easily add in a few sticks and take an old machine from 64MB to 256MB with no problems. Even if you have to purchase a couple of sticks, often you can find that kind of memory cheap on ebay or a local computer salvage store.The reason why this speeds up old computers is that they won't have to swap to disk as often. Many times the main reason why a newer computer is so much faster than an older computer is because they always come with more memory by default than the older machines did. The latest core 2 duo swapping to disk is almost the same speed as an older 486 computer that is swapping to disk.Another thing I have done is turn older computers into X terminals. Even an old 486 with 64MB of RAM makes a great X Terminal and you can install a complete Linux system that boots to an X server configured to connect to you main application server and give you a login screen. The only thing that doesn't work as well as you would want is streaming video. There are even ways to stream the sound out to the terminal, but I have never taken the time to do that.A 300 watt power supply does not draw 300 watts most of the time. You might be impressed at how little power those old 486's that are stripped down to just a couple of ethernet cards, minimal memory, and no graphics cards can draw. Often the computer will be drawing less than 100 watts of power. You could also install nice easy to configure software like "IPCop" <a class="user" href="http://www.ipcop.org&quot;&gt;http://www.ipcop.org&lt;/a&gt; on the 486 which blows away any hardware router in features and ease of use. You don't get VPN or transparent web page proxy caching until you spend a lot of money on hardware routers. Features of IPCop are here: <a class="user" href="http://www.ipcop.org/1.4.0/en/install/html/features.html&quot;&gt;http://www.ipcop.org/1.4.0/en/install/html/features.html&lt;/a&gt; Of course, the more features you add the more memory and hard drive space you will need to use. There are a lot of projects like this that can turn an old slow desktop computer into a full feature speedy firewall or even a file and print server.Interesting discussion on power usage versus landfill here:Your "Old" 486 & LINUX<a class="user" href="http://linux.omnipotent.net/article.php?article_id=10872&quot;&gt;http://linux.omnipotent.net/article.php?article_id=10872&lt;/a&gt;The 486 Follow-Up<a class="user" href="http://linux.omnipotent.net/article.php?article_id=10942&quot;&gt;http://linux.omnipotent.net/article.php?article_id=10942&lt;/a&gt;

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Talk about being penny-wise and pound-fullish. Old computers consume more electricity than they are worth. Junk'em! It is cheaper to buy a new computer, and use it to run VMWARE or VPC.

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I do a lot of work in people's homes and let me tell you that there are a lot of problems that happen because of heat. If I know they have a cat or dog I usually bring my little compressor and blow out the machine if they are having some flaky issues. If it is an overheating issue, that solves it.

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moral of d story: Respect and Adore primitive-age machines as they sometime served our purpose.tho i use IBM laptop I still use my "Dexie" who is now 6yrs old. I respect her cos she taught me what a computer is

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Ubuntu probably wouldn't be good for an old computer. I would install Gentoo or Slackware with E17/E16.

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You shoulda just used all the computers for servers and made a little hosting site. You won't get much money but if you offer a good deal and your connection is semi-fast you will get some :)

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KDE definitely isn't an OS but it contains most of the programs you use. (That is, if you prefer KDE)

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I installed vista on my laptop a while back to see if microsoft has caught up with apple and linux and it is just harder to use, more bloated and somehow has less drivers than windows xp did

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Damn. I wish I had neighbors like yours. Around here I don't get old/broken computers to play with often. When I do it is fun though, because once you get two or three you can build a decent working computer.

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