Offline uses for old computers

[fruitcake]

With a growing collection of perfectly functional desktops and laptops whose processors and memory are no longer fast enough for web browsing, I'm looking to use those computers as offline machines.

One of them will be a document archive, and will store scanned or photographed stuff that used to be on pieces of paper. The kind of stuff that I might want to refer to once a year, if that. The family photo albums could go on there. Boxes of photos would be digitised then their hard copies binned.

Another machine will be connected to a stereo and serve as an audio player in the kitchen, to spare me from The F**ing Archers. There's no reason why the content of that machine shouldn't be copied to a machine in an upstairs room for nighttime listening.

I'd like an e-ink display that I could use for viewing epub files on a dedicated machine. A desktop ebook reader makes perfect sense to me. Task lighting could be arranged, and a decent chair; there are obvious advantages to an ebook display not being handheld. That would allow me to remove bookshelves and put that space to other use. I love e-ink, and see it as a vastly under-used technology. Just need to find a suitable display.

The initial benefit of digitising the 'content' will be to save space at home. The spin-off will be that the stuff I own will be read and listened to (finally).

Anyone else doing this?

What other uses can old computers be put to?

[Pingu]

...Another machine will be connected to a stereo and serve as an audio player in the kitchen, to spare me from The F**ing Archers. There's no reason why the content of that machine shouldn't be copied to a machine in an upstairs room for nighttime listening...

This is what we had in the previous Igloo which was fine as the computer was in the loft, wired to the router. It was no good in this place as the router is in the hall so we could hear how noisy the computer was. The music now resides on a USB SSD connected to the router.

[Mrs Pingu]

...Another machine will be connected to a stereo and serve as an audio player in the kitchen, to spare me from The F**ing Archers. There's no reason why the content of that machine shouldn't be copied to a machine in an upstairs room for nighttime listening...

This is what we had in the previous Igloo which was fine as the computer was in the loft, wired to the router. It was no good in this place as the router is in the hall so we could hear how noisy the computer was. The music now resides on a USB SSD connected to the router.

Must use less power now..

[lissotriton]

Audio player is an nice idea. But what sort of interface will it use? Would want something easier than mouse and keyboard for the kitchen. Some sort of simple interface to pick artists/albums or radio stations etc.
Maybe a touchscreen/tablet. But why not just use the tablet as the audio player, do you need a PC? Or something based on a Raspberry Pi, would be lower power anyway.

[Pickled Onion]

Back in the Stone Age I picked up a “pallet” of old PCs for buttons and set them up as Linux terminals for the kids. It was a great idea at the time as all the processing was done on a central more powerful server (ltsp Linux terminal server project iirc) but that sort of thing became pointless as computing power came massively down in price.

I suspect the power requirements mean that the best thing to with old hardware is to recycle rather than reuse, sadly. A document store should be on a portable drive preferably two. An audio player can be good as it doesn’t suffer the Bluetooth problem where whoever put the playlist on goes out of range. But a Pi does this really well and doesn’t consume hundreds of Watts.

[ian]

I have an old Mac Mini that took over as a print server when the previous little box said its goodbyes. It also has a few drives plugged into it for spare backups. But it's only on when I need it, and it always was a fairly low-power appliance. Using an entire PC as an audio player, I wouldn't bother, you can drive that with a basic smartphone.

For backups, I wouldn't rely on an old PC other than for something to hang drives off, and well, there are better strategies to keep data safe.

I'm minded that it's better to get several years use out of a computer and then send it for recycling or use it as a novel plant stand/paperweight.

[Kim]

Yeah, energy consumption's the killer.  So potentially useful as a testbed for something, or a specific application where you'll only use it infrequently, but probably a bit of an own-goal for servers and media playing compared to leaner hardware.