Repurposing an Old PC: Get the Most Out of Your Hardware

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11 months ago

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Where Can You Find an Old PC?

You can find old Windows PCs just about anywhere. I’ve pulled them out of dumpsters, rescued them off street corners, received them from people who just wanted to get rid of them, and purchased them off Facebook marketplace. Of those, Facebook marketplace is the best if you want to shop for specific specs, but buyer beware: there are a ton of overpriced PCs out there. I still regularly see GTX 1060s priced well over $200, and PCs with 10-year-old processors selling for $500. I hesitate to call these sellers scammers exactly, but it is definitely not reasonable pricing, and you should avoid them.

Cheaply Refurbish the PC

Regardless of where you get it, once you have it, you need to perform some basic checks to make sure everything is in working order. Lots of people and organizations remove hard drives (or SSDs) and dispose of those separately, since they often contain sensitive information, so you should plan on buying an SSD to throw into any PC you pick up. Don’t break the bank here—you do not need the latest and greatest in PCIe SSDs, any old SATA SSD will do you just fine.

Retro or Low-End Gaming

If you want a dedicated PC for retro gaming, or you just don’t want to shell out for a high-end gaming PC, an old Windows PC can go a long way. Many of the greatest games in gaming history are now on the older side, and they don’t require a state-of-the-art PC to run them quite well. Consider titles like Skyrim, Half-Life, all the Bioshock games, Portal 1 and 2, and the pantheon of Star Wars games that were released before LucasArts was shuttered. All of those games would easily run on a now 10-year-old gaming PC, and many of them would run on even less.

Automate Your Home and Smart Devices

If you’re into DIY projects, you can do all sorts of cool things with home automation and a spare PC. Home Assistant is the reigning king here. While it doesn’t run natively on Windows—normally it runs on Linux—you can easily run it on WSL on Windows 11 or on a virtual machine running Home Automation OS. Once you have Home Assistant installed, you can automate all of your smart devices, make them communicate with each other, respond to conditions in your home, and even try your hand at self-hosting your very own voice assistant if your PC has the hardware for it.

Run a Media Server

If you’ve digitized your collection of physical media, you can easily turn an old Windows PC into a media server. The real catch here is hardware. Really old PCs won’t support modern hardware decoding (like H.265) on their CPUs, which means you’ll be relying on software decoding or the GPU, if you have one. Software decoding can be unusably slow, so your mileage may vary.

Create a Streaming Server

If I were setting up a streaming server, my first choice would be an open-source application called Jellyfin. Jellyfin ticks all the boxes for a streaming server: it lets you stream any audio or video file you load in, including movies, TV shows, music, and more. Install the Jellyfin server on your Windows PC, select the folder where your files are stored, and you’re good to go—just install the player on whichever device you want.

Create a Home Theater PC (HTPC)

There are a ton of options if you want to use the PC as a media center, but Kodi is an easy way to start experimenting. Kodi, unlike Jellyfin or Plex, is designed to be a self-contained HTPC solution. Instead of streaming your media from a server to a second device that plays it, you put the files and Kodi on the same PC, then plug it into your television or receiver with an HDMI cable.

Host Game Servers

Game servers tend to be less demanding on hardware than the games themselves, unless you’re hosting an MMO. The first PC I ever rescued from a curbside trashcan hosted a Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy and Minecraft server for many years without an issue. If you’re new to self-hosting game servers (usually called a dedicated server), I’d recommend starting with a Minecraft server. The official documentation is very extensive, and there are thousands of pages of questions and answers available on the internet if you run into trouble.

Some popular options for game servers include:

Minecraft server
SteamCMD
Valve’s game server software

Putting It All Together

If you can’t get a complete PC from Facebook marketplace, your basement, or the trash, don’t be afraid to piece one together, either. Take what works from one and slot it into another, assuming all the components work. This will not only save you money but also provide a unique and functional way to repurpose an old PC.