3 ways to repurpose an old Windows 10 PC
With the price of memory and storage rising rapidly with no hope of visible relief in the near future, it makes more sense than ever to try to get the most out of your old PC hardware instead of buying something new.
Here are 3 great uses for that old Windows 10 PC you just retired, or that Optiplex that’s been sitting in a closet gathering dust for a few years.
Create your own network attached storage (NAS)
A network attached storage device (usually just called a NAS) is a storage device that connects to your local network like any other computer. The main difference lies in the intended purpose.
A NAS is specifically designed to provide your own personal cloud storage solution. So instead of paying Microsoft or Google, you buy a few hard drives and throw them into an old PC. I’ve had great luck purchasing refurbished or recertified drives from ServerPartDeals: none have died, even after many years of use.
Typically, a NAS doesn’t require a lot of processing power, so most older PCs will do. This is especially true if you just want something that can serve as a backup solution for your files and photos.
This makes a NAS a great job for a PC that would otherwise sit in the closet collecting dust or end up thrown in the trash.
Don’t throw away your old PC: it’s a better NAS than anything you can buy
Doing it yourself is much more cost effective.
Some people use their NAS for more than just a storage solution, and the expandability of a typical desktop computer (even an older one) can be very useful. For example, many people run their NAS as both a media server. Often, media servers will need to transcode the video so that it can be played on another device on the network.
Sometimes it’s worth upgrading an old PC to function as a streaming media server in addition to a NAS, as this is usually as simple as adding extra RAM and an inexpensive GPU.
Running a game server
Many modern games are notorious for poor optimization, making some of them difficult to run even on high-end systems.
However, while the game itself is difficult to run, server multiplayer is generally much simpler. As a result, your average Windows 10-era desktop computer is a perfectly capable gaming server, especially if you remove Windows 10 and install Linux instead, since Linux is generally lighter than Windows.
If you have a system with enough RAM, you can often run multiple game servers on a single PC without much trouble. I have an old Ryzen 1600x (a six core PC) with 24 GB of RAM that I used as a games server. It had no problem tracking a Minecraft server and a Valheim server simultaneously, as well as a handful of other miscellaneous services.
Unlike many self-hosting and homelabbing applications, a games server cannot normally take advantage of a sophisticated GPU, so there is no point in purchasing one specifically for this purpose. In fact, if you configure your server for remote access via SSH, you don’t need a GPU in your game server at all.
If you’ve never hosted your own game server before, Valve has done an incredible job of making the setup process more accessible with SteamCMD. It is often enough to modify a few text files to set some basic server settings, then run the server executable.
Of all the ways I used my old PC, gaming servers are by far the ones I enjoyed the most.
How to Start Your Own Minecraft Server for Multiplayer Gaming
Minecraft is a timeless classic and you don’t even need a crazy PC to host a server.
Build a Home Lab for Self-Hosting
There are more self-hosted apps than you can imagine, and the best part is that many of the best ones are free and widely supported across the Internet. I would recommend installing Proxmox to start, as this allows running separate VMs or containers for each application. extremely user-friendly.
If you’re willing to invest a little time learning how to set them up, you can save hundreds of dollars a year on subscription services and maintain your privacy while you’re at it. One of my favorite uses has been as a home media server.
As a bonus, most self-hosted services don’t require as much computing power. You can run them even on a modest computer provided it has enough RAM.
If you’re ready to install a modern GPU, especially an NVIDIA RTX GPU, you can even deploy and run your own artificial intelligence.
And these three options are just the beginning. Once you get started, there really aren’t many hard limits on the types of things you can self-host on your own PC.
7 Self-Hosted Apps I Run 24/7
Availability is king.
