Ah, the personal computer – a trusted companion in our daily lives, making work simpler and providing hours of entertainment. That is until it becomes old, slow, and practically obsolete in the face of that hot new computational powerhouse in town. If you are like me, you may have a number of relics from bygone computing era’s laying about – but how can we salvage these task hardened veterans for another generation of aesthetic of functional use?
First of all, there’s the list of typical uses for old rigs: Legacy gaming station; Media centre and jukebox; Dedicated LAN server; Network storage and file/print server; Dedicated Internet firewall; Tor node; donate spare processor cycles to science;Automatic distro compiler and server; 3D rendering station; and cannibalise for parts.
Next, one should assess whether any of the old junk is actually worth something to somebody. An IBM Model M keyboard can fetch up to US$100 (±R730) among collectors using online auction sites. Now that has been taken care of, we can get to the fun stuff.
CD-ROM Drive
Aside from the obvious secondary functions of low-budget car CD player, cup holder and salami slicer, the CD-ROM drive can also be transformed into a laser pointer, a safe, and even a roulette wheel.
Hard Drive
You are bound to have a couple of defunct HDDs laying around, and they contain a number of parts whose use is only limited by imagination it seems. Aside from stripping out the magnets to use on your fridge, there are quite a few creative ideas floating around. The HDD clock for example:
If functional conversions aren’t your cup of tea, you can always visit Alex Andromeda for some artistic inspiration.
Processor, RAM, Motherboard
Although not much can be done with these bits, there are examples of CPU and RAM hairbrushes, CPU belt-buckles, and RAM key-chains. The motherboard components can be stripped for mostly artistic purposes, such as awesome little capacitor/resistor men. For more motherboard art inspiration
At this point you are probably left with some add-on cards which can be stripped for parts to be used in creating your mini capacitor/resistor army, a selection of fans, and the PC case itself. The fans are useful spares, but can also be used to build a hovercraft, or a rudimentary air filter.
Unless you plan to save the case for housing another PC, or modifying it to ridiculous extents, the case will have mostly outlived its usefulness. You can turn it into a birdfeeder, a massive reserve toilet paper dispenser, and even a makeshift braai/fire pit.
e-Cycling
Finally, if all this seems like too much effort, or you still have a load of junk leftover, you can do the ‘responsible global citizen’ thing, and take the parts to a local e-waste recycling depot, a topic which is covered in depth over on the MyBroadband forums.
Have fun bringing your old PC components back to life. Thanks goes to Instructable.com for the majority of practical ideas for old PC components.
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That whole barbecue thing cannot be healthy… Just… Saying…