I'm looking for ideas and a reason to hook up the second computer that I have in my closet collecting dust. It's a Pentium 4 1.5GHz, 320MB RAM, 1 - 40GB Hard Drive, 1 - 10GB Hard Drive, A nice ATI Radeon 9250 128MB video card, avermedia ultraTV PCI 350, with 10/100 network card of course, and just a 28X CD-ROM drive. The computer has NO OPERATING SYSTEM. The primary computer I use to surf the internet, check email, and my media server to stream music, photos, and videos to my TV. It's got everything I need; 2 - 40GB hard drives, 512MB RAM, 128GB video card, 1.70GHz Processor, and nice 4 channel sound card. I've attempted to use the tuner card before as a TIVO but I wasn't that impressed with the video quality. I'm not much of a computer gamer with an XBOX 360, PS2, and a modified Dreamcast to play my NES games. I also already have a 4 port KVM. Looking for any ideas or suggestions to use a 2nd computer for. -Maximus

Keep it as a spare for that inevitable day when your main system goes down. Either you need a 2nd machine or you don't - all of my decent hardware is currently in use, ymmv Diplomacy is the art of saying 'Nice doggie!'... till you can find a rock

Yep, it's nice to have a spare when you need one. Or you could connect it to the stereo as a very expensive Mp3/CD player, showing the visualizations on t.v. I like to keep an extra in my home office for GPS/mapping. I also have used older computers for playing around with alternative OSes when I didn't want to mess with repartitioning the drives on my primary machine - Linux, BSD, older Windows and DOS versions, etc. And I've also given away several older computers to people who didn't have access to one. Don't know if I'd do that with one as new as your's though. -Bob

Install Linux on it - I use Ubuntu on a second PC. Gives you another interest/different aspect to computing. Ubuntu is dead easy to use - very little, if any, of the old command line stuff, recognised all my hardware, connects to the internet with no problem, even able to connect to my Windows network automatically. Plus there's loads of free interesting software. "I know that I'm mad, I've always been mad"

Second PCs connected by a LAN are great for backups. But I'm sure you already have a good backup system, so I guess it wouldn't be needed, right? Do yourself a favor BACKUP!

That have better have been a typo when you said your main computer has 128GB of video memory..............

Yes, I already have a backup system in place. I like the Linux OS idea and Ubuntu looks pretty interesting. Thanks Johnr. Protohunter, yes that was a typo (128MB).