I have a few old PCs (one's REALLY old, we're talking it has 8MB of ram), and i was wondering if there's anything interesting i could do with them?

 

Could i hook one up to my PC and make it it's bitch, maybe taking some strain off of my main PC's resourses? or hook all 4 mobos together to make something that acts as one pc?

My friend knows how to hook a bunch of computers together over a network that all "work together" so technically yes it can be your bitch and yes you can hook all 4 together.

Serial cables? 8 MB of ram? Hmm.. I don't know if that can be done... You'd need a very low-grade OS.

You'd need a very low-grade OS.

 

I have windows ME

 

 

sorry

 

Anyway, that's the worst PC... the others are slightly better.

 

Is this the kind of thing i'd have to be really good at computing to do, or just moderately capable of not trying to forse a ram stick into a PCI slot?

Stick a cheap ethernet adaptor in the (£5 ish probably less), install some very simple linux distro on them all (debian base or something) then install a clustering package, say OpenMosix, and then you have your own multi processor super computer....

 

You can do it using a live CD called cluster knoppix if you so wish...

 

http://clusterknoppix.sw.be/

wow. that sounds surprisingly easy, cheers klaynos

 

I shal have a go when i next have time and the ethernet cards.

I have a few old PCs (one's REALLY old' date=' we're talking it has 8MB of ram), and i was wondering if there's anything interesting i could do with them?

 

Could i hook one up to my PC and make it it's bitch, maybe taking some strain off of my main PC's resourses? or hook all 4 mobos together to make something that acts as one pc?[/quote']

Ask these questions. Do each of the pc's have the same operating system,

can they then be ganged (networked) together best proably via DOS. Possibly they then could share their very limited resources. This configuration

within limits of RAM with even small (by current standards) be the basis of a sorta winner with disk space dedicated OS and data.

There are several that can, such as Linux, but I dont think DOS can really do something like this.

How much computing power can be combined before the (gigabit eithernet?) connections are the limiting factor, or is there some other limiting factor?

 

More specifically, could I use an old PII computer to boost my newer Pentium 4 (newer, 1.8 GHz), and how much would it really do?