What do you do with your old outdated PCs?

[ibanezfoo]

Old/er PC’s are pretty good at being used to run stepper motor devices so:
CNC Router
CNC Engraver
CNC Laser Engraver / Laser Cutter
CNC Plasma Cutter
Etc

There are SO MANY “CNC” gizmos and kits for sale these days. All over eBay and even Amazon. Just need a simple PC to do the CAD and then send the commands to the servo driver. Unless you extract all the gold then the PC won’t run so well.

If you have an old parallel port these work great! Although most people know those ports for printers but in reality they were much better for things that require realtime control such as a CNC machine. Slap LinuxCNC on there and go to town.

Just ordered a 5'x20' CNC plasma table this morning...

[Rob454]

An old 98/95 era box is useful to exactly no one. Not even third world would make use of something ~30 years old.

OP, just take it to an electronics recycler. Alternatively, most municipalities and some charities host recycling drives.

If you want SOMETHING to do with them, old CPUs, memory sticks, hard drive connectors, etc. generally have higher gold content than modern counterparts. So, you can clip the CPU pins, RAM contacts, etc. and put them in a jar that takes almost no space and accumulate enough to maybe get a small nugget worth over time. The yield is not worth the effort from a financial aspect until you get the commercial scale - but maybe gold recovery is something you'd find interesting as a project.

I have some panels for lighting security and controls that need to run old windows. Hell I have one that uses dos. Customer refuses to get rid of it. I told him when it craps out or my old laptop craps out hes sol. I couldnt find a dos program to load. I literally have a old Panasonic tough book for programming that panel. Its for a elevator take over control. The panel is no longer UL rated and i cant even get parts for it. Guy refuses to upgrade the elevators or the panel. It’s still all relay. Walk in the elevator room its three huge racks of relays all clacking away. The only elevator guy who knows how to work on it retired this year.
We all told him this is all held together with spit and used chewing gum.

[Fizz]

I let that kind of legacy system fail. When I consult for IT projects clients that refuse to accept reality and lean on me to kick the can down the line get declined. It sets bad precedence when you continuously bail them out of of their mistakes. I'm perfectly honest that I can probably bandaid the solution for the indefinite future, but I'm just not interested in doing the work and if they insist they'll need to find someone else to work on it.

Also, you can probably get away with virtualizing an old OS, and using USB passthrough + adapter for whatever peripheral you need (Serial/Parallel, etc.) to get the solution on modern equipment. It also allows you the possibility of doing a P2V conversion that keeps the solution intact, and allows you to create an image of a known-working configuration.

[crufflers]

I let that kind of legacy system fail. When I consult for IT projects clients that refuse to accept reality and lean on me to kick the can down the line get declined.

Also, you can probably get away with virtualizing an old OS, and using USB passthrough + adapter for whatever peripheral you need (Serial/Parallel, etc.) to get the solution on modern equipment.

What virtualization product would you recommend on what MS Server OS?

[crufflers]

The only elevator guy who knows how to work on it retired this year.
We all told him this is all held together with spit and used chewing gum.

There are old old HVAC systems like that... where they have controls and webserver built into the system to allow users to change settings day to day, but require an old laptop, Terminal, and a null modem cable to program it via command line... if you ever do something like change an IP address for that web server.

[Fizz]

What virtualization product would you recommend on what MS Server OS?

You don't need a Server OS. Windows 10/11 can do virtualization just fine.

If you want USB passthrough Hyper-V hypervisor isn't an option. I've had a lot of success with VirtualBox.

[RBShooter]

Send them to CGN member Dragunov. He'll fix them up and give them to people in need. I sent him a laptop a year or so ago, will have more going out to him by year end.

[crufflers]

You don't need a Server OS. Windows 10/11 can do virtualization just fine.

If you want USB passthrough Hyper-V hypervisor isn't an option. I've had a lot of success with VirtualBox.

Cool, Maybe I can build something... but I have a fairly new dual Xeon with 2012 R2 running a pretty low utilization SQL database... already built and has 128 gig memory, not much storage... but I could use that. Would Virtual box need much memory / resources to run one virtual machine?

[ibanezfoo]

I let that kind of legacy system fail. When I consult for IT projects clients that refuse to accept reality and lean on me to kick the can down the line get declined. It sets bad precedence when you continuously bail them out of of their mistakes. I'm perfectly honest that I can probably bandaid the solution for the indefinite future, but I'm just not interested in doing the work and if they insist they'll need to find someone else to work on it.

Also, you can probably get away with virtualizing an old OS, and using USB passthrough + adapter for whatever peripheral you need (Serial/Parallel, etc.) to get the solution on modern equipment. It also allows you the possibility of doing a P2V conversion that keeps the solution intact, and allows you to create an image of a known-working configuration.

Thats a good point. I have virtualized a number of our old tool controllers. Old XP machines that feed the machines via serial. I use Startech NETRS232 serial over IP devices. Works just fine. Also allows you to make a clone so if anything gets corrupted on the main one you just flip over to the clone and production continues. Some of this old stuff is not worth trying to beat on old hardware. You spend more production downtime than just spending a few days after hours making it all work. In the middle of trying to do that right now with a 5 axis plasma CNC machine.

You can also use USB over ethernet devices so you don't have to use USB pass through. I use that for HASP license keys that some of this equipment uses.

But on the flip side I also keep some older hardware and just build a few hardware clones of machines that cannot be virtualized (giant decoiling machines and such).

[crufflers]

eBay is about to get new listings for parts.

[ATTACH]1078300[/ATTACH]

What sells from those old HP's? Memory, CPU's, worn out proprietary PSU?

You can get reconditioned Optiplex's like 9020's with i7's Win 10, SSD, 32 gig ram, for $250 or so that actually do look new.

[jeffyhog]

Make sure you retrieve all that old Bitcoin that you forgot about before you give it away.

[Fizz]

Cool, Maybe I can build something... but I have a fairly new dual Xeon with 2012 R2 running a pretty low utilization SQL database... already built and has 128 gig memory, not much storage... but I could use that. Would Virtual box need much memory / resources to run one virtual machine?

Any desktop from within the last 5 years can do virtualization no problem. If you're running a 32 bit guest OS max memory worth assigning is 4GB.

The VM will only use as much resources as you give it.

[rice_man]

[crufflers]

What are those CPU's Core2Duos?

[otteray]

I've got Linux thumb drives for trying out various distros; fedora, Manjaro, Tails, (The Amnesic Incognito Live System) as well as full installs of Linux Mint; alongside Win 7 and 10 in a couple decade old laptops. Entering BIOS to make boot choices, or fiddling with drive partitions, is much less of a worry in those.