At some point in your computing life, you will purchase another shiny new computer to replace your current one.
Bring new life to your old machines
As throwing away tech gear isn't exactly environmentally friendly, there's a good chance your old machines are gathering dust somewhere in your house. So why not consider recycling them or retrofitting them to serve a new purpose.
Luckily, older PCs and their kin are more than capable of handling a number of new uses; you can turn them into anything from gaming rigs to media stations where everyone in your family can rip CDs and fill up their MP3 players.
Here are my top 10 choices for what to do with a PC that's past its peak as a primary computing device but still has plenty of life in it for other uses.
1. Use an old laptop as a guitar amp
One excellent use for an old computer is to re-imagine it as a guitar amp. You'll need an audio interface to connect a guitar to the computer, and you'll need used computer speakers.
For my amp, I used a seven-year-old Apple iBook G3 that was loaded with OS X 10.4 (Tiger).
That older operating system could be a problem, because most of the newer apps that work as guitar amps - including Native Instruments' Guitar Rig 4 Pro and the free version of Sonoma Wireworks' RiffWorks T4 - require OS X 10.5 (Snow Leopard).
I ended up using Cockos Reaper. It's free for the first 30 days, and after that you need to purchase a licence. While the full commercial version, which can be used by businesses, is $225 (£156), individuals that want the software for personal use can buy a licence for $60 (£41).
It works well on older Macs because it's a light app that doesn't use all of the latest bells and whistles of the Mac OS Core Audio components. The software has guitar distortion sounds, delays and grungy hard rock settings.
Now that I had my amp, I needed an audio interface. I already had a Cakewalk UA-1G, which is a slimline device with just one volume button, a quarter-inch port for the guitar and an attached USB cable.
The driver for the UA-1G worked great with the iBook 3G running OS X 10.4.
I connected a pair of powered speakers and brought my iBook back from the dead, ready to rock.
Interestingly, the sound quality on this older iBook was still quite amazing, mostly because it's not necessarily the Mac that's generating the sound - your computer becomes a fancy controller for the audio interface.
In fact, quality (and the all-important power output) depends more on the speakers you use. I used a pair of Boston Acoustics RS 334 floorstanding speakers that sounded outstanding.
NEXT PAGE: Use an old laptop as an email terminal
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Comments
steve said: Cyteck I dont think stegra was suggesting installing linux on a BBC micro rather on the type of retired PC referred to in the article BBC micro is 30 years old
Incony said: Thanks Ashrich ive already tried that on the old pc i get no mouse at all the HD boots but itslocked because the security input needs a mouse input and the MB cannot see a mouse usb or otherwise so i cant get passed the securitySo ive tried adding the HD to the newPC using the CD ribbon cable as its the only one that fits and the new pc can see the HD says its ok but wont read anything so ive an old pc that can see the hard disk but has no means of using amouseand a new pc that can see the hard disk but not read it thats odd since if the HD can be read bythe old PC but not the new then it must be something different between old and newi know this isnt the place here to discuss that but the idea that one can use old pcs isnt as easy sometimes as it sounds
Contax said: I remenber doing company accounts and payroll on a Toshiba laptop with twin 720kb 35 floppy drives no HDD My first IBM PC was colour CGA with twin full height FDDs 360kb per disk everyone wanted to come and see it keyboard was best ever made then I fitted a 32mb RLL hard card HDD on a card with controller built on I started computing in 1983 with the Apple II and BBC B computers those were the days I have a pallet piled high in corner of my garage with old BBC computers and other bits for them one in the Oak case with separate keyboard and second processor built in its like the gold plated ones they did for oil sheiks kids but mine is just beige
ashrich said: Incony Get a USB keyboard instead of a PS2 that will give you access and it doesnt matter what processor you previously had if you cant read the data try booting into safe mode although the data may be fried as well as the keyboard interface
Incony said: Ive an old athlon Motherboard PC complete with a 20 GB Hard Drive wow 20 GB was big once that has a dead keyboard interface the board interface is dead and destroys keyboards plugged in I want to save the info on the HD but though XP on my new PC can see the HD if i plug it in it cant read it because i guess the new PC is using Intel not Athlon worse the HD doesnt have the new connectors its got the CD type ribbon cable connector any ideas I cant use my old PC but the HD is sound i just can get the info off it
zeem said: BBC computers are great for playing retro games Ive also used mine for word processing and general messing aboutThe other week I took an Apple Powerbook 540c circa 1994 to work and did some real work with it creating a spreadsheet of user accounts and email addresses I then had to copy the resulting file back to a more modern machine - via a floppy disk -
Cyteck said: I seriously doubt you could install Ubuntu Linux on a machine like a BBC micro Sadly such hardware is just too old amp even linux does have some minimum hardware requirements in order to be installed or work
stegra said: How about installing Linux The only things on my PC under 10 years old are the optical drives yet ubuntu 10 makes it fly Ive seen all these Linux love ins on here before and thought Oh Give over But once you try it you believe it
The Grey Panther said: Ive got a working BBC B micro Shame to ditch something which gave me so much pleasure and you only get about 5 for it on EBay if youre lucky Suggestions for using an antique such as this would be very welcome