What would you use a Pentium 4 computer for?

[Omega-TI]

Currently enjoying Lubuntu and may try Linux Mint later, found a good old Nvidia 7200 gs to stick in one!

 

So anymore silly suggestions ( looking at you --- Ω --- ) are ignored.

 

Awwwwww!

Okay, I'll make a DECENT suggestion...

How about a dedicated platform for running a dedicated BBS?

[OldSchoolRetroGamer]

 

Awwwwww!

Okay, I'll make a DECENT suggestion...

How about a dedicated platform for running a dedicated BBS?

 

Damn, that actually sounds excellent but I wont lie, besides using them back in my C64 days I don't recall much about BBS systems and don't think it is something I would be very good at implementing let alone maintaining, I appreciate the suggestion though thanks.

[John_L]

One could always donate it to the IRS as a backup device!

Doubt it.. unless you actually believe a hard drive crash is why those emails are missing.

[jaybird3rd]

Doubt it.. unless you actually believe a hard drive crash is why those emails are missing.

As someone who has done IT work for the government, I think that "explanation" is about as credible as "the dog ate my homework". Their excuse, of course, is that they "don't have enough resources," even though I've run a tighter IT shop with less money than the IRS spends on pizza and dance videos in a year. Next time one of us is audited, we should try "Sorry, my hard drive crashed!" as an excuse for not providing any documentation, just to see what the IRS says.

 

But anyway ... I've enjoyed reading through the suggestions offered here, too, because I also have a bunch of older PC hardware that I don't want to throw away. So far, here are the (serious) suggestions that have been offered for things that an older PC can be useful for:

 

• A testbed for secondary/niche operating systems
• An emulation box
• A light duty network server
• A dedicated game machine
• A secondary or backup workstation for the "basics" (Office, Web browsing, etc)
• A dedicated device server (APE/SIO2PC, etc)
• A home security system

 

This might fall under the "network server" category, but another possibility that occurs to me is to use it as a host for a networked backup/cloning solution like FOG. Or, drop in a nice graphics card and set it up as a home theater PC using XBMC. I also plan to set up one of my really old machines as a standalone in my study, to use exclusively for writing.

[RickR]

I have an old relic computer in my garage. I use it to keep my car maintenance spreadsheets, and to stream music or movies when I'm puttering out there. Hooked up to a stereo with BIG speakers. And also my main computer backs up files to the garage machine once a week.

[Manoau2002]

You could use it for mame emulation.

[jaybird3rd]

I have an old relic computer in my garage. I use it to keep my car maintenance spreadsheets, and to stream music or movies when I'm puttering out there. Hooked up to a stereo with BIG speakers. And also my main computer backs up files to the garage machine once a week.

That's another good idea: save the old PCs for environments where you'd like to have access to a computer, but that are too harsh to risk setting up a "good" machine. I once put a pile of old Pentium III computers and CRT monitors back into service by setting them up as diskless workstations. They were used in a factory which was plagued with heavy dust and temperature extremes, and they actually held up pretty well in that environment for a few years. We'd long since gotten our money's worth out of all of them, so when they finally began to give out, it was no great loss to swap them out with other old hardware.

[+Ripdubski]

Load Linux on it and make it a guest computer with internet access. Have browser run at login. Though most ppl have their own devices these days.

Edited July 8, 2014 by Ripdubski

[Keatah]

For data recovery operations, bringing your data back from beyond the brink. While hot and heavy and long in the pipeline - there's something to be said for ECC RAMBUS and reliability. The synchronous lock-step memory/cpu operation is desirable in some recovery situations. And it runs on the reliable 850E chipset. And its got old school IDE pata ports.

 

Our main writing and journaling machine (when we're not being nostalgic on the Apple II) is a P3/P4 "hybrid". Big 2mb cache, P4 GTL+ style data bus, SSE2 instructions, super short <11 stage pipeline. Good energy efficiency for its time. Eco-clockable down to 8MHz from a lofty 2.23GHz. No fan required. A rare (for intel at the time) mix of the best of the P3 and P4 architectures.

 

TRIVIA: The P4 ran its ALU at 2x the advertised-on-the-box clock speed. The chip was so inefficient they had to do that. In the later iterations of the P4 you'd have portions of the die blasting by at 8 or 9 GHz.

Edited July 9, 2014 by Keatah

[nacho220033]

I own 2 Pentium 4 PCs.

 

1- Generic, in mid-tower case, Pentium 4 2,4GHz. Runs Windows XP pretty fine, tried Windows 7 but didn't work. I use it when I can't use my laptop like now.

 

2- Toshiba Satellite 2410-SP203, Pentium 4 M 1,8GHz. Not decided OS yet. I try some Linux Live OSes with it.

[82-T/A]

You could use it as a really nice Windows 98 SE system. There were a lot of games back in those days that run too fast on newer machines, but that run just perfect on a 98 SE / P4 machine.

[mehguy]

As for modern day use, I would install lubuntu or ubuntu. Pentium 4's are really only good for web browsing, email, word processing etc.

Edited January 22, 2015 by mehguy

[akator]

^ In addition to Ubuntu and Lubuntu, I would recommend giving Linux Mint a try. I've got Mint Cinnamon 17.1 Rebecca running on a 2009 HP Mini netbook (2GB, integrated video, single core Atom1.6Ghz) and it is still suprisingly useful for those same tasks. It even works with Netflix (only in Chromium browser), Hulu, and Amazon media streaming.

[almightytodd]

I use mine with Windows XP as an emulation platform. It runs MAME, Stella, Altirra, ProSystem, NES, SNES, Intellivision, and ColecoVision emulators reasonably well. I have it connected to my Sony CRT TV so I can get the full "time-travel" effect. I also have it set up to multi-boot into Bodhi or Lubuntu Linux, but with only 256 Mb RAM it doesn't run those very well. Additionally, I can access my office computers (CORE i5 PCs) via Citrix and it actually runs FASTER than running a Citrix connection from my CORE DUO machine with Windows 7.

[fujidude]

How about making it your ultimate LAN/WAN router? Throw IP-Fire on it and you have a router/firewal plus a ton more you can do with it that will knock over any consumer level all in one router you can get. For example, I was using a pretty high end "router" at home and switched to a virtual server running IP-Fire. Before doing so, my internet speed choked up a fair amount if I did much of any larger scale torrenting. The limited RAM and processing power of the poor Cisco/Linksys just couldn't compare to the "in stride" performace of the latter.

Edited January 24, 2015 by fujidude

[Osgeld]

yea but for one months worth of electricity you can buy a sbc more powerful than a pi and it runs for a month on a lantern battery

 

I cant see why anyone would want a several hundred watt system on 24/7 for such minimal tasks when a 70$ dual core 1.2ghz arm can do better in less than 8 watts under heavy load

 

P4's are space heaters, even AMD beat them per watt which is why the core 2 design came about, and thats damn sad

 

use it for games, though there's no games that need it, any game based on clock cycles will blaze at 900fps even with a 386, and all windows 9x+ games will run on modern hardware (hell I ran MS-dos 6 on a i7 worked mostly ok outside of sata and sound)

 

its a boat anchor

Edited January 25, 2015 by Osgeld

[kaufenpreis]

I have two old Dells with P4s in them. Using one as an Ubuntu box to mess around with and the other as a Minecraft server. Works really well. P4s are still beastly.

[fujidude]

That's why. Lots of people are willing to buy more power rather than "let go" hardware which still works. So, for those, like the OP, my suggestion is still good I think.