Put Your Old PCs to Good Use

I have trouble parting with old technology. I've got one of the first digital cameras—each floppy disk I insert holds ten pictures. I've also got a Zach Morris phone from the late 80s, and two old laptops and one desktop. The phone and the camera might have to take on new lives as objects d'arte, but there's still hope for the PCs. If you're willing to replace the OS of your old machines with Linux, you can turn your old computers into actually useful stuff. Over at the Pramnos.com tech community, there are some great suggestions for what you can do with your outdated machines.

Here's my favorite:

Turn it into a Firewall â€" Proxy server

One of the best uses for an old PC is to turn it to a dedicated hardware firewall machine. There are some Linux distributions like Devil Linux and SmoothWall that do just that, but you can do it with any distro anyway, as Linux has it's own firewall, IPTables.
If you combine it with a small proxy server like Squid, you will also gain lots of bandwidth and speed to your home network, and of course this can save you some money.
To do all that you don't need a fancy Linux distribution with all the latest technology stuff. You need just a simple and very light distribution. And for optimal performance, you don't even need a graphical interface. After all, you won't use it all the time, you just set it and forget it. You can just install Webmin to configure it using your web browser from another PC, just like you do it for your router.
If your PC is strong enough, you might try to use Spamassasin too. It's a program used to clean your email from SPAM. Very useful.

Bonus: In the comments, one reader describes how he quickly turned an old PC into a dedicated Skype machine.