Discard it. Old computers are less than worthless.
Let's say you've got an old Pentium 4 machine that you want to make use of - nothing ancient, still perfectly capable of doing useful work. If you use it as BitTorrent machine, it'll easily suck up 150w. As a distributed computing node, more like 300w. Running 24/7 that's 1314 kW/h or 2628 kW/h a year.
In the UK, cheap electricity costs around 13 pence per kilowatt hour, meaning that this 'free' old machine will cost you £170 a year with a modest workload or £340 a year if working hard. An Atom-based nettop will consume around 30 watts under load, will have comparable performance to a fast Pentium 4[1] and can be bought for less than £200.
The only reasonable thing to do with an old computer is discard it, or recycle it if you don't mind the idea of a Chinese child stripping it for parts[2].
up-voted because of nice comparison of performance of atom and p4 cpus, but 35W is what cpu eats alone (vs ~110 for P4 cpu may be?). How much atom-based nettop will consume watts in total?
And what about I/O throughout, is nettops compared to desktops?
I think about either reusing existing old desktops or buying one of these nettops for:
1) home network server, which will act as media storage and as VPN gateway for home network.
2) media server for my tv
Let's say you've got an old Pentium 4 machine that you want to make use of - nothing ancient, still perfectly capable of doing useful work. If you use it as BitTorrent machine, it'll easily suck up 150w. As a distributed computing node, more like 300w. Running 24/7 that's 1314 kW/h or 2628 kW/h a year.
In the UK, cheap electricity costs around 13 pence per kilowatt hour, meaning that this 'free' old machine will cost you £170 a year with a modest workload or £340 a year if working hard. An Atom-based nettop will consume around 30 watts under load, will have comparable performance to a fast Pentium 4[1] and can be bought for less than £200.
The only reasonable thing to do with an old computer is discard it, or recycle it if you don't mind the idea of a Chinese child stripping it for parts[2].
[1] http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_lookup.php?cpu=Intel+Atom+N2... [2] http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/static/in_depth/world/2002/...