I’ve convinced the IT staff in my office to dump their collection of aging P2-450 machines on the office population, as freebies in time for Christmas. They’re old Gateways, usually with a 6Gb drive or less, 128Mb RAM, maybe an nVidia Vanta and a leftover 40X CDROM. Grubby as all hell, too.
The only downside to an otherwise free computer is the operating system. Since they all came with Windows NT on them, the IT boss says they’ll all leave with NT on them … even if they had valid XP editions installed.
I volunteered to help with the low-level format, plus the reinstallation. It’s not as painful as it sounds, since NT takes only about 20 minutes to finish on that grade of machine. Of course, you’re left with nothing. But it’s still only 20 minutes of your life. Killdisk finishes in less than 10 minutes too.
And it’s for a good cause, in a roundabout kind of way.
Checkout Freegeek.org and their wiki: wiki.freegeek.org
Their organization rebuilds and distributes computer with Linux. They have ‘franchises’. My professor at school and I are trying to start one up here in central florida.
Keep up with your posts of old hardware redo’s.