That dusty, outdated computer can still do household chores
Posted on Thursday, May 8, 2008
URL: http://www.nwanews.com/adg/Style/225114/
You may have an old computer or two in a closet, basement or attic. I put my old machines there, but only because I don’t know what else to do with them and I’m not quite ready to throw them on the junk heap.
There are better ways.
For one thing, you can give the computer away. Donating is a fine and generous act.
But in some cases, you may also be able to put an old computer to work right in your home. That’s what I did with my recent basement rescue. It now serves as a helper in my ham radio room, keeping track of contacts and looking up locations of the other radio operators I visit with on the air.
There are plenty of more ordinary uses for an aging and underpowered computer.
Any working computer — no matter how old — could do a great job as a kitchen computer. Besides storing recipes, it could keep inventories of what you have on hand and then create shopping lists. With wireless access to the Internet, it can send those lists to a printer on your network, or roam the Net to hunt up new recipes.
A kitchen — with its heat, water and grease — isn’t the most hospitable location for a computer. So place it well out of the line of fire and make sure it’s connected to an outlet with ground fault protection (nowadays most bathroom and kitchen outlets have that protection, but just be sure ). Most office supply stores sell plastic dust covers for computers, and that’s an excellent idea for a kitchen computer.
If the computer eventually breaks down because of the environment, you haven’t lost much — especially if you’re able to connect it to a network so that your recipes are stored away in another location.
Another use for an aging computer is as a guest and kid machine. That way your information is safe from prying eyes or careless use. If it breaks, well — again — you haven’t lost much.
My uncle keeps one computer isolated from his home network. Information stored there is completely safe from hackers. And if a destructive virus or worm slips by his protection, the computer in isolation hums on with no problem. So it becomes a storage point for financial records and sensitive material. Properly backed up, it does a great job. In most cases, your old computer can do that just fine.
A more recent computer with a large hard disk could even serve as an online backup server. In many cases, that’s asking too much from an antique. It all depends on what you have on hand.
The great thing about all this is that by letting an old machine share part of the computer load in your home, you are freeing up your best computers for the most important work.