PCA Forums

The perks of being in an A+ class at school The teacher was clearin' some stuff out and gave me a K6 233Mhz PC (case w/250w psu, motherboard, CPU, onboard sound). I put a floppy and some RAM and a cheap 2meg PCI vid-card in it so it's a decent little machine (needs a CD-ROM) but I have no idea what I'm gonna do with it really.

It's not exactly a gaming machine (could play older games like warcraft/quake nicely) and it only has a 5gig hard drive. What would you guys do with a machine like this?

The 15" monitor I got had a missing pin but I plugged it in and it works fine. Good color and all so it must have just been a ground or something. I also snatched up a spare K6 233 CPU/heatsink... ...Probably would have to pay somebody to take it

I'll take the monitor. Oh, be sure to include $20 in the box for all my trouble.

hehe, I have no reason to get rid of a good monitor I have 3 15" monitors now and the one I just got I like the best. Our old 15" sony has a shaky picture in both windows and DOS. I can see windows because it might be the refresh-rate, but why is it shaky in DOS as well? Tells me something might be wrong with it The 15"er I just got is highly reflective but has good color nad all. Text is clear. The other 15" monitor I got from my uncle which has some problems. I just need to break back into the DB-15 connector and resoldier all the wires--but it's still pretty crappy

Oh, well, fine. I'll take it for free..

Seriously, though. I am looking for another monitor. Not a 15". Anything 17" or higher. most preferably another 19" Sony Trinitron. I think I found one a ebay, $170. They are in the Twin Cities, so i might be able to pick it up. And even if they don't let me, they charge actual shipping costs, so it would only cost me $20 to ship.

Anyway, you got a fairly good system. I would keep it as a backup if I ever need, or maybe an experimenting PC. Enjoy.

Thats the thing, I don't really need another "experimenting pc" I already have a POS Pentium 150 that I don't do anything with Although this is better than the 150, no doubt. Maybe I'll just trash the 150, it ain't doing anything but takin' up space. Pretty useless....

You might see if you could donate it to the needy. Contact a local church or thrift shop. a machine like that would come in handy for some poor family.

True, it's not like I need it around. I was gonna give it to this kid at school in my A+ class who doesn't even have a PC but when I offered it to him he said he didn't want it.....

Linux servers!

imagine your own ftp, web, samba, and mail servers all in one box.

Well, my 1.4GHZ machine with RAID-0 does better FTP servering than that 233 could ever imagine Either way I'm not supposed to do that with comcast nor is it easily done with the 15kb/s upload cap :| I definitly thought about making it a Linux box cause I know nothing about it and it would be fun to learn. I have both redhat and mandrake so maybe I should try that. One of the linux "techies" at school said I could make it a router but I don't really know how I'd go about doing that? And when they say that, do they mean I can use it as a hub so that I don't have to go out any buy one? I just dunno.

You'd have to buy a hub to use it as a router, but they are a lot cheaper than buying a router. You can find lots of great HOWTOs on setting up linux to do just about anything at http://www.tldp.org. If you are going to be playing around with linux, I wouldn't use it as a router though. There is a fair amount of know-how involved in securing a linux box and if you don't set it up securely as a router, it would be hacked in less then a week (promise). I would recommend you setting it up with linux to just play around with it and learn all about it. If you are still trying to get A+ certified, Linux would be an invaluable tool and make you that much more marketable.

Well, I'm already certified now, but I just thought it would be fun to play around with I'm just tryin' to get my feet wet because it seems most servers on the web are Linux so there must be somthin' good about it, ya know I'm mostly a gamer/multi-media person when it comes to my PC so I know linux doesn't offer me much in that department, but I'm sure it would help to learn for my Network+ class next year

Thanks for the info....

yeah, as far as the games, you could probably play some of the games you like (i.e. Half-Life) and with some work, you could also get Q3 going....but if you do make it a linux box (which I'd like to see if you ever get it done then I would recomend you installing Mandrake, I've heard that that version is far more user friendly than Redhat.

A couple side notes: Mandrake is based upon redhat, and I THOUGHT i remembered hearing somewhere that Mandrake couldn't do as much....maybe someone in here could clear that up?

Also, I don't know what version of Redhat you have, but as far as the easier installation, that problem could have been fixed in later versions, I've been out of the loop for this kind of information for quite some time now....


[edit] about the games too, the only way I have an opinion on that is b/c of the article on PCA's page....here's a direct link to the site: http://www.livepc.tv/?articles=1&sC=28&= hope this helps...

I was thinkin' of installing mandrake today. I have nothing else to do with the machine. I scored a 4mb AGP vid card (trident 9860) but it can't even run OpenGL quake at the lowest possible resolution, so it really isn't much of an OpenGL card My real problem here is hte CD-ROM I got is a POS, so I'd be lucky if I could actually get it to read hte CDs

Linux is an interesting alternative OS and it's very likely that you'll encounter it in networks running as a server.
It won't hurt to know at least some basics of Linux.

Mandrake is a n00b friendly version of RedHat. You can download the basic edition freely in form of ISOs, I think it's 3 CDs. I suggest that you also buy a recent Linux book, that will help ya with most of the beginner questions.

I have a second PC which is for my Linux experiments. It currently works as my DSL-Router, DHCP, DNS and firewall. My favourite Linux distro is SuSE, currently version 8.0 ... no free ISO avail for download but I think it's worth the money.

I think http://www.Extremeoverclocking.com
still has a video on building a "getto router" using a couple of old nic cards and a hub on an old 486 no H/D and a little ram.If not I have a copy i can post somewhere. the software is a linux dist. on a floppy deal.seems pretty cool.
bill.