Asking for more computer help

W

Wolfeman

Member
A short while ago I asked if anyone had some old ram lying around that I could put into an old computer for my daughter. Cowrockets and mouse (from CCGaming) answered the call and now my old computer is packed with ram

Imagine it looks like this now
gallaxhar_imm.jpg

My daughter was delighted!

Until my father in law won an ipod and gave it to her. Now the computer sits dejected and lonely waiting for a purpose again.

I jammed a bunch of old hard drives in it and am looking to turn it into a media pc of sorts since I got rid of my DirecTv recently. However it's running win XP and does not want to play nice with the other network PC's and stuff in my house.

So..... Does anyone have a copy of Vista or some other Windows OS (that is higher than XP) that they aren't using and would let me have? I have a copy on steam of Abe's Oddworld I'd be willing to pass on to whomever feels the desire to help me out.

Thanks again!!!
 
/me looks for his old Vista keycode. Then you can download a vista ISO and just burn it to a disk for installing.
 
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If it is for media server check out www.amahi.org
It is free and can take a bunch of drives and make them 1 big pile of space for media.
It runs great on older hardware too.
 
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ewoksrule said:
If it is for media server check out www.amahi.org
It is free and can take a bunch of drives and make them 1 big pile of space for media.
It runs great on older hardware too.
Click to expand...

Thanks. That's pretty much kind of what I'm doing.

Right now my biggest problem however is the fact that XP just doesn't like to play well with others. It keeps turning off my network, putting it to sleep, stops sharing for various reasons, changing IP's and just about anything else it can think of to be difficult. While all of these issues have work arounds, I'm putting in more time researching and fixing problems than I am actually using my network hub/ media center/ do background stuff computer.
 
Are you planning on putting Steam games on it? If not, you could try Linux Mint :)
 
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I have 2 laptops and a desktop I use regularly. It used to be my wife's desktop but is pretty old. The memory really helped to make it usable again but my daughter had kind of drifted away from it in favor of her ipod. To that end I want to make it a kind of storage and control center for other network things in the house. Since all my other computers run windows OS's I was hoping to just upgrade it to Vista and make it all one big happy family without any real work. I have no real experience with Non windows OS's other than the OS the Apple Macintosh ran and the window's DOS before they got rid of it.

Mint might work but how much time would I have to put into getting it working versus getting XP to play nice with the network?
 
I'm not sure exactly :/. I think XP might be easier to share than Vista or 7 with a Linux machine but it has been so long. But I am also thinking that as long as samba stuff is installed on the Linux machine and stuff is shared properly on Windows, it works fine.
 
I will second Amahi, especially if you install the XBMC package for it. I use a different setup now, but Amahi is a very stable and effective setup for what you are looking. XBMC is a fantastic media center setup that should serve you well.
 
Thanks. If I can ever get my Windows XP computer to play nice with the rest of the network I'll look into it. Right now just busy fighting XP.
 
As Linux distros go, Mint is likely the easiest to install and configure.

You can always burn a Linux Mint Live CD or install it on a 1GB+ thumbdrive to test it out before installing it to the hard drive.
 
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