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[battleship]

Hello!

I recently acquired an old PC from my parents after they upgraded. It's an old Dell 8300 with a Pentium 4 and XP. I'm thinking of using it for a ripping/server running JRiver. I mainly want to use it as a music server and ripping machine using DBPoweramp. So to get this thing off the ground, I have some questions and maybe this community can help me:

1. I plan to wipe it and reinstall XP. I want it to be very bare bones. Good idea?
2. Is it worth trying to make this beast more energy efficient? Since it's a music server, it will most likely be running all the time. Any power saving ideas?
3. Is this a good idea? I'd like to get some use out of it, either this way or I'll recycle it.
4. We're a PC/Mac house with iPhones and I'd like to be able to access this library from whatever/whenever.

Any help is much appreciated! Thanks in advance.

[MrC]

This thing is 10 years old.  I'd say, recycle it.  Your life is too valuable to wait for the slow, endless XP software updates and its sorry, tired processor.  And certainly don't spend a dime on it.

I couldn't even give this away.

[pcstockton]

I use something similar with XP for serving music to my main HTPC and also for steaming off network to my iPhone (JRemote).

I have been streaming HD video, and HD audio, to as many as 4 zones at a time without ANY issues whatsoever.

I would use it until it dies!

Mine is powered 24-7 and resides in the office which is perfect for me.

Cheers!
Patrick

[glynor]

I couldn't even give this away.

If you still have that thing, it'd make an awesome whitebox firewall with Astaro or Untangle or pfSense.  My Astaro was running on a 939 dualie until last summer when I replaced it with an orphaned Athlon 3800+ AM2 board (which I switched to because it was on a mATX board, lower power/noise, and I could put it in a smaller case).

Works great.

Before the 939 (which was once my HTPC before it got upgraded to a Core 2 Quad), I had the firewall on my old NForce 2 (the Honored ASUS A7N8X-E Deluxe) with the sweet Barton XP-M 2500+.  Now that was a board.  A little finicky, but rock-solid (and still works now), and it'd make those Athlon XPs sing...

Sigh.  Those were the days, my friends, those were the days (now get off my lawn).

Anyway... The 939 would be a good choice for a nice router, if you want to do something with it.

And, if not, I think I have another one in a box somewhere I'll give up.  I even might have (though I might have junked it, finally) an old Gigabyte NForce 3 board with an AGP port somewhere.  That thing was a rare bird.  It was a socket 939 board with AGP.  I think they only made like 12 of them.

[MrC]

I gave it to a local school.  If it had dual ethernet, I would have kept it, or suggested it, for that.  But I shutdown my Smoothwall firewall/router ages ago.  Back when SonicWall was the only game in town for a sub $1k VPN firewall, I was happy to build/manage my own.  Now, there are so many nice products, I see no more reason to spend the time and energy.

I built the same Shuttle for my mom, but her power supply died and we decided it wasn't worth the cost to purchase a new one (at about $80-100).  She's all Retina display now, and very happy for it.  I think hers is still sitting around her office (and she'd probably be happy to give it away).

[glynor]

But I shutdown my Smoothwall firewall/router ages ago.

I used to use Smoothwall back in the day too.  Very nice, for what it was, though I eventually wanted more features.  I can't use a router without Full NAT and VLAN support now, as I do too many funky things with my network for no good reason.

What do you use now?

[MrC]

What do you use now?

http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=74114.msg502850#msg502850

[InflatableMouse]

First thing I do when I buy a new router is replace the firmware with OpenWRT. If there's no OpenWRT firmware support for the device, I don't buy it.

I know its not a dedicated hardware firewall appliance but for less than a 100 bucks its as good as it can get. With the Bootstrap theme it gives a very slick looking GUI too.

If you hadn't heard from it its definitely worth checking out. Its basically a linux kernel running on a router with openbox, ssh and a webbased GUI for management, including iptables, nat, vlanning, vpn, you name it. There's repository with extra software you can install to enhance its functionality.

[glynor]

http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=74114.msg502850#msg502850

Ahh, yes.