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Looking for any creative thoughts anyone has on what I might be able to do with several large Hard Drives and a 5 year old PC or two. Other than the garbage can.
Doing some cleanup around the house. Realized I have 3-4 PC's sitting around only used for clients who refuse to update older machines. I keep the older software on them for those special situations. I also have large hard drives on them. I thought it might be a good idea to do one of a few things. Your wisdom appreciated other than the obvious throw them away!
Out of Curiosity, I was wondering since several of these have older OS's on them would it be of any value to keep a few older OS with software that works with it Crystal Reports Business Object Enterprise. Tableau Desktop on some of them. Is it possible to put them on a box that at StartUp allows me to pick and choose what OS I startup with?
- Salvage any and all components HD's Wireless Adapters Graphics Cards USB etc. I am guessing that some of the HD should work universally right?
- Move some of them over to a new modern Motherboard 64 bit with more horsepower RAM performance. ( I realize that the problems I may run into are compatibility, non-supported drivers OS issues and probably BIOS stuff. )
- I was thinking by consolidating some of the data I might be able to get some more use like backup space etc.
- Take the hard drives and create some kind of file server and or printer server with a machine or two.
Out of Curiosity, I was wondering since several of these have older OS's on them would it be of any value to keep a few older OS with software that works with it Crystal Reports Business Object Enterprise. Tableau Desktop on some of them. Is it possible to put them on a box that at StartUp allows me to pick and choose what OS I startup with?
- One - XP, 2 HD
- Two - Vista for Business, One - Win 7 Pro
- One - 2012 Win Server Dell PowerEdge 830. Can Windows 2016 Server be obtained for low cost in developmental purposes? Used to have Biz Spark.
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Hopefully you can check my last post and see if I am on the right track or not. Thank you gentlemen.
doing a multiboot to the various older operating systems just adds a level of complexity and yet more items that you have to manage/update/provide backward compatibility.. convert them to vm's if needed. .
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Mr Favor, Johnson & CompProbSolv. Thank you.
Love the idea to recycle. Will Install Drive Bender, and or freenas.org
If I can turn one PC into a Linux box for stuff that might be cool especially for my website!
Last thing and I may have missed it but can you set up multiple drives that already have an OS on it like XP Vista Biz& Win7Pro and upon startup select the drive to start and be able to go into that OS and drive and work from it. (Maybe through the BIOS?)Then log off restart to a different OS...? Or is that what the NAS does?
As you can see from image. The hard drives just on one of the old Vista Biz machines has tons of space. 5-6 Teraytes each machine at least. Used to have Oracle, SQL, BAAN, etc on them. Now they are just a wastin'.