What to do with old mobos

[laserblazer]

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.

[kmount]

Beowulf Cluster! Linky.

 

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

[OutToLunch]

Freecycle or a £10 job lot on Ebay...

[CyberNerd]

new boxes, and make them thin clients

[Joedetic]

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

[kmount]

That's a pretty good idea Gibbo.

 

Gives me something to do next week

[contink]

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.

[Guest kerrymoralee9280]

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.

[dhicks]

Beowulf Cluster!

 

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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David Hicks

[laserblazer]

 

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

[Domino]

.....frisbees?

 

 

......really rubbish frisbees?

 

 

WEE be damned

[dhicks]

I have 15 Viglen 111D mobos with 500MHz celeron processors. 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?

 

--

David Hicks

[SYNACK]

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?

 

--

David Hicks

 

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.

[ITWombat]

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.

Edited April 5, 2008 by ITWombat

[PeterW]

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

[SYNACK]

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.

 

On the older boards at least the base memory was located on the motherboard itself as dos would report 640k + however many MB of chips you had installed. But I think that most modern motherboards will simply not allow you to boot without a RAM chip installed.

[Sirbendy]

Always wanted to do a display of exploded PC parts, all labelled up and on view on a board or similar...but running, connected together, using an old CRT or similar in a display cupboard running a "Welcome to the IT Suites" info board type thing.

 

I have an old IDE drive somewhere with a perspex top cover that I was playing with..never quite found the time though.