Repurpose early-2006 "Core Duo" iMac

[oldmacuser1]

Hi everyone! I am in posession of an old iMac (in fact, a VERY old one - the first Intel iMac with the 32-bit "Core Duo" CPU) that I would like to repurpose. The iMac still looks and works like new and currently I have Mac OS X 10.5.6 Leopard installed as the main OS. At the moment, I use the iMac as a media center where I have plenty of music videos and films stored in the iTunes library. I use it mostly as an offline device to consume the media locally. However, the issue with this is that when I am planning on adding new videos to the iTunes library, I have to download the corresponding film manually onto a separate device, copy that onto the iMac and edit all its corresponding metadata (title, release year, cover etc.) by hand. As you can see, this is quite clumsy. I have also grown somewhat tired of using Mac OS X Leopard, which results in me trying to find a new purpose for this device. I also have a Snow Leopard CD lying around somewhere, but I've heard that SL is somewhat laggy on this iMac (even with 2 gigs of RAM). Would it be possible to turn this into a NAS, for example?

If you have any ideas on what to do with this device, I would be glad!

Thanks!

 

[Basic75]

Have you thought about using Plex for your media library? Using it as a NAS should work, too, you can also install Linux on it.

 

[oldmacuser1]

Have you thought about using Plex for your media library? Using it as a NAS should work, too, you can also install Linux on it.

I don't think there are any Leopard-compatible Plex versions out there, otherwise I'd definitely give it a shot. Thought about installing Linux as well, however that would be too boring wanted to try out something new, since the machine is still in such good shape and throwing it away would be too bad. But thanks anyways!