I seem to remember reading somewhere that you can turn an old working computer into a personal server, it it true, anyone know how? I've got 3 old computers I sure would like to do something useful with them.

you can turn almmost any computer into a server, just install a linux server on it.

Depends on the specifics of the computer AND what you want your server to do. Post what you want from it here


Oh yea, and don't touch windows... unless you have Novell installed on it, too.

I don't think it will be very stable

It's stable..

I use one of my old computers as a server:
Pentium II
350MHz @ 392Mhz
384 Mb SD PC100 Ram
OS: Windows 2000 Prof.
System Availability: 99.9823%

- Cordack

I bought an old Compaq Celeron 500 specifically for this purpose and it works great. Windows 2003.

Current Uptime: 116 days

Bill, I could kiss you

at my university the server is a pentium I computer with aix unix o.s.
and current uptime is about 3.5 years

A PIII server will work great and apache is free. Previous recommendation about running it on linux instead of Windows was a good one.

There's a reason the majority of the servers on the net are NOT Windows :-)

Don't plan on hosting anything with a lot of traffic, though, unless you've got at least a T1 line.

I don't see the benefit in having a Linux/Unix based operation system over windows server. It's more difficult to use (for newbies) and has more remote exploits than you could swing a bag of nails at.

It's more secure; more sophisticated. Besides, if you're a newbie, you should learn a few things first, anyway.

Windows would be easier to get working if all you want is a file server for the network.

Totally depends on what you want to do.

You've got to be kidding... Linux less secure than Windows??

Linux/Apache is faster and more reliable than a Windows server in every possible way. Any server admin will tell you that.

And if that's not enough for ya... Windows does a terrible job of running PHP, the web's most popular scripting language.