What do you do with your old Macs?

[Paulywauly]

What do you do with your old Macs when you upgrade to newer ones? If you keep them what do you continue using them for? Has anyone got any unusual or quirky uses for old Macs?

 

[miles01110]

I usually sell them or donate them depending on how old they are.

 

[Doc750]

gave my old macbook a tune up (ie clean install of OS X leopard, upgrade 500 GB hard drive, 4 gb ram) and gave it to my little sis.

 

[leekohler]

In the past, I either donated or sold them. However, I bought the last rev dual core PM G5 when it came out, knowing that Apple was going Intel. I intend to use it as a server when it is no longer useful as my main computer. But for now, it's still an excellent machine and edits HD video quite well. That's it's primary function at the moment. I have a 2.4 black MacBook that can handle anything Intel only.

 

[Hellhammer]

I'm not a fan of selling computers or any electronics. Usually I keep my computers and use them as backup machines. I haven't had that many computers to really have a plan what I'm going to do for them but my old Acer is currently somewhere in the house used by other family members. Currently I have 24" iMac and 13" MBA which both are used daily. iMac's main duty is to serve as a media center and server but I still use it for normal tasks daily.

Since Macs have higher resale values, I've been thinking about selling them in the future. Right now, I would be interested about selling my iMac and building a Hackintosh as there are certain features that I would like to have (internal HDs, better performance, Blu-Ray, upgradeability...) but I think I'll pass. Maybe later.

 

[Paulywauly]

At present my main computer is a 21.5 inch iMac around 12TB of external storage, use it as a server and for everything else in the house. It replaced my first Mac (white intel iMac) which i sold to my family after i fixed a hard drive failure.

My girlfriend also got me a 15inch iMac G4 a few years ago which runs Leopard. Intended for it to be a server but ended up being a funky looking kitchen hifi and print server. Gets loads of attention when we have guests.

She got me a special edition ibook clamshell a few weeks back in perfect condition (a 466Mhz Graphite with half a gig of RAM and a DVD ROM) which is my new pet project. currently trying to make it as useful as possible. So far ive got it doing the following:

- Its runs the latest release of Tiger (with spotlight, dashboard and a few graphical options disabled to give it a performance boost)
- Camino for light web browsing
- Dropbox syncing
- scheduled backups of the system onto a tiny USB memory stick which doesnt stick out of the case 😀
- Mobileme syncing for iCal, Mail, keychain
- iTunes 8 - for playing the shared iTunes library on my main iMac
- Access to bunch of media/document network shares on my iMac
- Printing over the network to my iMac G4
- A battery health monitor (displays number of charge cycles and other battery health things)
Im still trying to find a good lightweight word processor to use on it. I have installed Bean but havent really tried it yet.

I also have a slot loading imac G3 lying around which makes a very high pitched buzz most people cant hear, but i cant find a use for it so never tried to fix it or use it