What to do with a 500 MHz Pentium II Desktop ?

Locha

Good Morning everyone,

I would like to ask you what someone can do with an old Pentium II Desktop with 384 Megabytes Ram? Any plans that can be done through such a computer?

Thank You.

badbyte

Well you could use it as a firewall, dhcp - and dns server

scorz

OpenBSD router.

AvoK95

I installed an FX5500 256MB AGP card and I use the PC for LAN gaming at home. Games such as CS1.6, old NFS games and such. Then I collected some parts from places and now I got a Celeron 900MHz with 512MB RAM 40GB HDD with an upgraded graphics card of ATI All In Wonder X800, running Windows 7 Home Basic and playing all sorts of games including NFS U2 and CS Source. Right now, I'm trying to find a Pentium 4 board so that I can get COD4 running.

You can also install Damn Small Linux on it and use it as a second computer.

badbyte

A P2 for gaming is for me a pain, this is a matter of concept. But openBSD is a very good chioce for securing a network infrastructure.

ballad

overclock it till it fries

badbyte

That would be an interesting experiment with water cooling...

AvoK95

badbyte wroteThat would be an interesting experiment with water cooling...

Or oil cooling ^^

shant

file server or a keychain i guess

Locha

do you advise to use it for downloads and torrents and stuffs? What do u suggest as an OS ?

badbyte

As an OS I would use openBSD or a debian. I think that you are new to the open source OS, but if that isn't the case you could run your torrents via terminal. Adding up a gui to it would slow things down a lot. How much RAM do you have btw? 128MB is very little for a gui now a days, but there is a minimalistic user interface like "fluxbox".
But if you are new to the open source OSes and you REALLY want to do this, I suggest to start some googleling, and I'm glad to answer your questions when you get stuck somewhere.

Locha

Thank you for your support guys !! It is really appreciated

unbreakable

you can get windows me as an os i had it on my old one it was pentium 2

AvoK95

unbreakable wroteyou can get windows me as an os i had it on my old one it was pentium 2

Windows Me is probably the worlds most horrible OS :P

It can run XP just fine. But Damn Small Linux would work alot smoother.

Nabs

Mod it, turn it into a one-click duplicator.

badbyte

duplicator?

unbreakable

i runned xp on a 650Mhz cpu it sucks you need at least a 1Ghz processor to let xp work fine AvoK95

AvoK95

unbreakable wrotei runned xp on a 650Mhz cpu it sucks you need at least a 1Ghz processor to let xp work fine AvoK95

I've ran it on 550MHz for 8 years until I got my Pentium D PC. It runs fine. The requirements are a 233MHz Celeron processor. You just have to be sure to install the 1st service pack and not the new updates. In terms of software aswell, you should install the old versions to make it more lightweight and less demanding.
I personally installed Mozilla 3.6 with XP SP2 on a PC with 128GB RAM and 333MHz celeron processor. It's no i7, but it works great.

badbyte wroteduplicator?

Get a SATA or IDE card and a few DVDRW and you got yourself a duplicator.

unbreakable

well i ran sp3 on 680mhz it was awful

AvoK95

unbreakable wrotewell i ran sp3 on 680mhz it was awful

You were probably limited by your RAM or your HDD was just too old.