Spare Parts

[chunkylover53]

My father bught a new machine and gave me his old Gateway so I could wipe the hard drive for him. He left it with me, and asked me to throw away or donate once I cleared his personal data.

I thought I might try to harvest for spare parts, specifically the processor so I could have a spare, but now that I look it's a Pentium III and I can't think of any reason why I would need to have one of these lying around. The computer is slow but in good working order, so I'm thinking I might as well donate. Any opinions?

[RickyTick]

You could use Paragon Disk Wiper. Seems like I heard of another program called pckiller or killpc, or something like that.

I guess you could simply remove the hard drive and throw it a way.

[RickyTick]

Depending on how big the hard drive is, you might be able to add it to your home network (if you have one) and use it like an external hard drive to save large files or pictures on it.

[chunkylover53]

Guess I should have asked that question differently. I already wiped the hard drive and I re-installed Windows using his original recovery disks. So the hard drive is clean (a whopping 13GB by the way), and it's up and running.

I'm going to keep the VGA monitor for a spare, but as for the computer I don't need another extra lying around. I was going to harvest, but most of the components are just not worth saving. But with all of the talk about people needing an old chip to update BIOS, I thought I might grab this one to have a spare. But it's a Pentium III, and therefore not socket LGA775. I can't think of any reason to keep one of these as a spare, but that's why I decided to ask if it's worth having.

Feels like it might be more useful to someone else as a working, albeit slow, machine as opposed to me pulling the CPU and recycling the rest.

[shyster]

Donate it to a local school or your old nextdoor neighbor who does not have a computer.

As you have said it is not really a good computer for practical use anymore, but it can still be used for basic things like surfing the internet and word processing.

As for your spare parts question, yeah I highly doubt anybody would need a chip that old, unless you keep it for so long that it becomes an "antique," and thereby gains monetary value because of its sentimental and historical value.

Those are my ideas anyways.

[The Wise Monkey]

Install Linux and use it as a server. :)

[shyster]

A server of what?

And I do mean this literally, I am not all that familar with Linux other than I know it is very stable and can run forever without needing a restart.

What could you run on a server that small? A webpage would have too much traffic for it to be a server in that sense, what else could you do with it?