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Hardware Thread, What to do with old mobos in Technical; I have 15 Viglen 111D mobos with 500MHz celeron processors. They are cluttering up my room and have to go. ...
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    What to do with old mobos

    I have 15 Viglen 111D mobos with 500MHz celeron processors. They are cluttering up my room and have to go. I suspect that they are too low spec for the charities who provide equipment for the needy but has anyone any ideas before I bin them. I've used the RAM elsewhere.

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    Beowulf Cluster! Linky.

    Alternatively, you could use them as wall paper in the office?

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    Freecycle or a £10 job lot on Ebay...

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    new boxes, and make them thin clients

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    A less technical suggestion would be to give them to the art/DT department to make a pretty wall piece for the IT department.

    Wash them all off, lay them out in the layout you want them on the wall...get the DT tech to cut some MDF to size, maybe with a frame made from beading round the edge (that bit might have to be recessed around the edges using a router) and then use some no more nails to stick the motherboards on then wall mount it

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    That's a pretty good idea Gibbo.

    Gives me something to do next week

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    contink's Avatar
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    The ebay idea may still be worth a shot if you prefer cash..

    My father repairs PC's down in Devon and finds clients often just want their old steam powered thing to be fixed rather than spending the money on a new system, so I sell him old mobo's cpus and the like.

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    kerrymoralee9280
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    Hows about you turn them into digital photo frames - theres a website dedicated to doing this with instructions for various laptops.

    Not sure where you'd store them - maybe pin them to a wall or something.

    Laptop to Digital Picture Frame

    GRYNX Laptop on the wall - WallTop

    Plenty of sites with a google search and you gotta admit some of them look pretty smart when done properly.

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    Quote Originally Posted by kmount
    Beowulf Cluster!
    Quote Originally Posted by Joedetic View Post
    A less technical suggestion would be to give them to the art/DT department to make a pretty wall piece for the IT department.
    Do both - nail the motherboards to the wall and connect them up to do map/reduce style computing, with space-heating as a side effect. Add flickering LEDs at your discretion.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Gibbo View Post

    You also might like to consider a 'retro' wall of old computers if space allows )
    We already have these. We call them the ICT Suites

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    .....frisbees?


    ......really rubbish frisbees?


    WEE be damned

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    Quote Originally Posted by laserblazer View Post
    I have 15 Viglen 111D mobos with 500MHz celeron processors. <snip> I've used the RAM elsewhere.
    Is it possible to do something useful with a processor with no RAM? Is it possible to write useful programs that run (quite a bit faster...) on just the on-board cache?

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    SYNACK's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by dhicks View Post
    Is it possible to do something useful with a processor with no RAM? Is it possible to write useful programs that run (quite a bit faster...) on just the on-board cache?

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    Old school dos apps that can run in the 640k of base memory, that is of course if the motherboards will actually allow you to boot them with no expansion memory installed. Some micro linux stuff should work to.

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    Quote Originally Posted by SYNACK View Post
    Old school dos apps that can run in the 640k of base memory, that is of course if the motherboards will actually allow you to boot them with no expansion memory installed. Some micro linux stuff should work to.
    Surely the distinction between base and extended memory is only a distinction in what it is possible to address in real versus protected modes of Intel x86 processors.
    The base (i.e. first) 640K of the memory map would still be on one of the RAM modules that were removed.
    Last edited by ITWombat; 5th April 2008 at 08:28 AM.

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    You wont be able to fire the boards up without any ram installed

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