What to do with this...... CAUTION- Old hardware

[Bullmecha]

Hey folks,
Recently finished getting an OLD pc running and wondered if it would actually be worth using as maybe a home file/media server or something. Just wanted some input from the professionals here on what you all think. Specs are as follows...

Dual Pentium Pro 200 CPUs
maxed 512MB RAM
6GB WD hard drive
3DFX Voodoo3 16mb video
PCI USB adapter card
PCI SMC Ethernet card

Yeah I know its old but I got the board running after owning a pair of them for 2 or 3 years. I would like to utilize it somehow other than an old gaming rig if possible.

Currently running Ubuntu 12.04 LTS and it runs stable but the CPUs are having a fit at 90%+ usage.

Any ideas are welcome other than throw it out etc.

Thanks all

 

[jasonlylevene]

Without knowing your interests, the potential list is too large to just type everything.

Tuning Ubuntu will be paramount. The description is beyond the scope of a post here, but basically you'll need to investigate what is taking up that 90% usage and prune what you don't really need.

If course that implies you know what you're going to do with it. At the time the Pro @ 200 was the top tech of the day, but that was the 90's. Software expectations will need to match that era.

You could use it as a highly advanced router, if you needed one.

It could function as a fairly decent, low duty file server, or as a backup destination storage controller.

If you're able to write software, it could become a home security & control center.

The fact is, though, for the power it consumes, it has less compute power than a typical low end smart phone. So it's deployment is a matter of intrigue and curiosity more than practicality.

Don't trust the 6G drive. Using it is fine, but backup - expect it to crash at some point.

To look at this from the opposite perspective, you can't expect this hardware to run a web browser compliant with modern web sites, and many of the applicable office applications will be extremely sluggish. Even purchasing RAM to expand the machine would be difficult.

The fact is that most software in the last decade lost priority regarding efficiency, focusing of feature expansion. In the era when that hardware was current, a web page would barely consume 1 or 2 MBytes of RAM to render. These days we're lucky of a web page requires under 25 MBytes to render.

In that era Javascript was used primarily to animate rollover buttons, or something of that duty. These days websites are written like applications, and Javascript (being inefficient) consumes a huge amount of processing power relative to the Pentium Pro era.

That said, if you had some database requirement, it could serve that need. Many of the modern database systems for Linux are quite efficient, and would run on a character based Linux. I personally managed database systems in the 80's and 90's, serving large organizations with hundreds of users and databases of millions of records on hardware less capable than the dual Pentium Pro (as in far less than half the compute power).

 

[Thelosouvlakia]

You can install windows 2000 or 98 on it. Or you can install FreeDOS for some even more retro goodness!

 

[Bullmecha]

I know that software of today is no match for the hardware of yesterday, it is a pentium pro after all. I have tossed the idea around for a router / storage server being highest on the list. RAID isnt something I have experience in, but i would like to keep my older software around for feeding my vintage urges, considering I have multiple configs from my C64 to my 950 floating around this house.
I am no software guru but i can read and learn as i go. So I am willing to try and do an Ubuntu tweak or maybe drop 2kPro on it instead. Options are all over as you stated. Maybe a bit more thought and the old box will be up on the corner desk doing something in the modern day to show its still got something to offer.

Thanks for the posts. Any more ideas are welcome.

 

[shambles1980]

it should just be set up as a dos box. MS released dos as open source a while back "well i say they did but it was just some of the very earliest dos"
but I would definatly just set it up for some nostalgic dos gaming sessions. Or at a push i would install windows 98 on it which gives you both dos and a windows version that will let you play some games like king pin and monkey island and so on.
Emulation on that system probably is not going to end up so well.
but games from the early to mid 90s should run nicely on it for some nostalga.

 

[joca94]

Check my sig to see what rig i used till 2 months ago when it died