I have a computer in my hobby room that kinda sits there and does nothing. First, here are the specs:

Compaq Motherboard
1.4 GHZ processor
512 megs Pc100 ram
40 Gig hard drive
14 gig hard drive (slave)
Dvd rom
Hewlitt Packard Raid controller card
HP Casette drive w/40 gig storage cassette
4 port USB 2.0 expansion port with 4 port drive bay insert (total of 8 ports)


Right now, I use it as a server (I have windows 2000 server installed on it).
I never leave it turned on, and I don't have a static IP through my current ISP, so even if I did leave it on, it's kinda useless.

My question--- what in the world should I do with this computer?

DO NOT donate it to goodwill or the salvation army.

those two places are doing something other than making donated computers available to the public.

What do they do with them then?

What do they do with them then?
i have inquired about it and here is the responses i got.
"we are fixing them up for the children"
"we get alot of donated computers"
"we don't accept computers"

in 2001 goodwill put an ad on the local radio thus:
"we need people to donate their old computers"

furthermore the software that is donated is not made available to the public.
i have only been able to find childrens software.

I didn't want to give my computer away. I wanted to use it for something.

I want to make it do something cool, but I don't have any ideas for what kind of cool stuff I could do with it.

I didn't want to give my computer away. I wanted to use it for something.

I want to make it do something cool, but I don't have any ideas for what kind of cool stuff I could do with it.
you can put it in another room and use a direct connection between the two and go head to head with your friends when they come over

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SETI

heh, yeah, be a seti cruncher =].

how fast is your Internet? you could host your own little website. as long as you don't get too many visitors, you are all good =]

I would , but I don't have a static IP

Nowadays you don't need a static IP to host things from your home computer. However if you have alot of accesses they will chew up your bandwidth (Considering it's your Upload speed thats used to calculate how many people can connect and at what speed, plus of course limitations due to operating system/server settings)

Extra computers can cover many tasks for instance allowing your CPU to be used for things like Seti, cureforcancer, genefolding etc

Perhaps you could use it to download/upload files in a sharenetwork (notibly files you are allowed to share that are either created/owned by you, or licenced to be shared)

You could turn it into router/firewall, or of course run different servers to learn about them.

You could of course on top of that donate it somewhere or sell it to someone. (believe me, you don't want to start collecting out of date computers, they tend to take the place over)

About Goodwill:

In my city they have a computer store. That's right, a Goodwill computer store. All sorts of things from boards, to chips, to ram, to old software. I've found near-mint in box copies of Wing Commander: Prophecy for example, a rare 1Ghz K7 processor (not T-bird), K6-III's, Intel Xeons, ect.

The place is a PC Hobbist heaven.