Cleaned it up and factory restored it To Vista 32 bit home premium.
It differs now from the original specs in that it has the max 4 Gig of Ram, 1 500 GB drive rather than 2 x 250. And most importantly a fairly new Geforce 650 card rather than the on-board video.
I'd buy THAT for a Dollar. (I know, but Robocop was just on & I always loved that saying).
Might try a local school or Library . They might be interested in it if you want to donate. Or for that matter, My address is ................................ Hehehehe... joshing around, but you never know. Might just get lucky once!
You might be better off selling the 650 alone and then selling the machine with just the integrated for very little money to someone who really needs a machine and doesn't have much money. Someone who would buy the machine to use isn't likely to be interested in the 650 graphics card. Then you could sell the machine for maybe $75-100 and the card for another $50-75 or so.
I'm assuming it is working properly and doesn't have any intermittent hardware problems.
Yeah, I think I will do something like that. But, throw in a Geforce 610 (better than integrated). And keep the 650 as a spare in case my 760 craps out on my current system.
Another idea could be selling the video card and use the rest for some sort of a fun project for yourself, freenas, ipcop, or just Linux box if desired.
It will probably sell for $40 or $50 without the GPU. The same with the GPU.
I've sold a number of these type of systems on craigslist. I don't get much for them, I just want them out of my house and $40 is slightly more worth it than putting it on the curb.
Most people looking for a system of this speed just need something basic and aren't considering video performance. Usually, its someone still stuck on a P4 windows XP Dell that just died and wants the least amount of investment into getting back up and running again.
With the low values reported, I'll just keep it in a corner as a backup in case my main one craps out (video card or whatever). Or throw Linux on it, but I already dual boot linux, so probably not.
Right. Usually not worth the time, especially when you consider the time spent re-imaging the machine and. Although at one point I had something like 10 of these dual core machines clogging up my workspace so they had to go.
Definitely fun to have a dev box to try out stuff like newer version of linux, steamOS, or whatever, but they lose their novelty fast if you have no real reason to keep a linux system running.
I don't know how many other PCs you support, but I like to keep one system, at least a core2duo, with win7 and 4+ GB of ram ready to go with a clean install. I constantly have family members calling me to help fix their computer. It usually has a ton of spyware/crapware on it, and they are always VERY resistant to a reformat. So I simply offer up the replacement instead and its gets them on their feet real quick.
Our of curiosity, why are they resistant to a format but not to a completely new system? If they're keeping the old system around, and especially on the network, the new one can get infected pretty quickly.
I used to do the same, keep a bunch of old systems around for testing or some server or such. The power costs (and heat generation) killed that idea pretty quickly. Now I have one beefy Dell server that runs Hyper-V and I can run all my testing and such in a virtual machine that doesn't take up as much power or produce as much heat.
Our of curiosity, why are they resistant to a format but not to a completely new system?
Its mostly mental. People that are this inept at tech and live on the ass end of the spectrum tend to have bad experiences with reformatting windows.
You bring a disk over and reinstall windows. Okay, wheres your windows key? Oh, don't have one. Little johnny down the street installed it for us last time. So you get them a key from some other system and continue on, 45 mins later. Windows installs and theres no networking. Hunt for drivers for some crappy knockoff card. Get that installed. Where are their saved emails? What saved emails? You told me you used gmail. Oh, well I also had outlook express with 23 years of saved email too, I guess I didn't mention that when you asked me what I wanted to back up. Where did that go? All of that is even if you can get windows to install in the first place. Sometimes the systems are so flaky that when you go to reinstall you get CRC errors and the install process exposes a bad hard drive or bad motherboard. Of course, all of this is the computer guys fault.
I don't play that game anymore. I hand them a working system and tell them to sort out the details.
I also agree on the power costs and heat - no point in running 2 or 3 servers on dual core boards at 100W each anymore. VMs all around.
