I have a couple of older systems I have been wanting to use / repurpose but I am afraid to connect them to my LAN or directly transfer files. I know I could always format the drive but the drive has a lot of old pictures and one or two programs that are irreplaceable to me.
The first system is a 2006 Dell E521 running Vista, AMD Athlon 64 x2 Dual Core Processor 4200+ (2.2ghz 1000mhz bus, 1mb L2 cache) 4gb 800mhz Dual Channel ddr2 sdram
How should I go about this?
The second machine is a Emachines Intel celeron running Windows XP! I have to find my PS2 mouse and keyboard to get it running!
Afraid of what exactly? The modern machines on your LAN have virus protection right, and are up to date on whatever updating method you use?
If these are your old computers, why don’t you know if they’re infected or not?
Good point,
I think copying your irreplaceable pictures off these drives should be your first priory. I’d be more afraid of bit rot than other devices on your LAN.
You could use a USB to PATA/SATA adapter, and mount the drives on new systems. Then you can scan the drive if needed, and copy off any valuable files.
ok, I’m just nervous don’t know why I would be exactly…
As said, rescuing your data is most important right now. Fortunately, you can set both systems up to share their drives with your current machine and you can copy files from them. Coincidentally, LTT did a video about that just today, but there’s tons more on the web. Make sure you watch several and pick up on the common things they do (because they can do certain things wrong, risking security and/or your data). You can safely do this over your own network. Just don’t let these machines connect to the internet w/o supervision! (best way: unplug your router on the ISP side, plug back in after you shut down both old machines)
Now, as for repurposing either or both, said LTT video has some ideas. Just don’t expect great performance out of it. Set your expectations accordingly.
HTH!
I got my old files off. I don’t really think these things would be good for anything other than running these older programs.
I guess I made a mistake and connected the old PC to my LAN while touching the internet. Although it didn’t seem like it cared. I don’t even know if I can get onto the internet with the machine.
Good. Check that all data has been transferred correctly before doing anything else with those systems.
Once you get your old files off, I would check out batocera, it’s a emulator distro and it’ll run on a potato
I think a 4400+ might run PS1 and N64 games
If you’re interested make a new thread and tag me and I’ll be happy to help
After thinking about it a little, I will just remove the old hard drive.
GigaBusterEXE, that would be something interesting. I think I will do some reading into the capabilities of this hardware.
The CPU supports 64bit addressing, it has 4GB ram …
If you don’t have Linux experience and want to see what it feels like, you could probably try booting some small live Linux ISO and go to town from there.
What GPU does it have?
It has a Nvidia Geforce 7300 LE
Broadcom 440x 10/100 integrated Controller
Conexant D850 PCI V.92 Modem
WDC WD16 00JS-75NCB SCSI Disk (160gb sata)
4gb of CM2X2048-6400C5 (5-5-5-18 800mhz Corsair XMS2 DDR2)
305w of Power supply
It’s pretty clean for the age. I don’t know what card is missing, I can’t remember anything being there.
4GB ram chromebooks are still sold., … but it’ll probably suck for youtube and similar since nvidia no longer supports that gpu in modern drivers - and the card didn’t do too much video decoding acceleration to begin with.
otherwise, it should be an ok machine for basic browsing / email / learning to write code or similar using a modern kernel and drivers and stuff
there’s no AES crypto extensions on the CPU, so you’re looking at wireguard for any kind of decent VPN and if you want to encrypt disks for any kind of NAS use, then ... --cipher xchacha12,aes-adiantum --sector-size 4096 ... , which was developed for low end mobile phones, should probably work well enough.
a $10 gigabit pcie x1 network card might be a good addition if you want to make this a router with a few containers like pi-hole, or similar… and if you happen to have an old small sata ssd lying around you’d be off to the races.
distro wise - I’d give ubuntu mate a try for a desktop distro … but mostly likely it’d be more useful without a desktop… accessed over SSH for whatever purpose.
Is it possible to just use it on the network for when the need arises for a disc reader and storage? My current PC case doesn’t have provisions for a disc reader.
not sure what your issue is here.
if you want to protect the other machines you put them on your main machines lan network and use the main machine as the firewall.
as long as you dont connect your old systems directly to the router and allow them to have there own ip to the web your good.
the only limitation is that the main machine has to be on and running the lan.
an alternative is you set up a raspi black hole. the raspi can use linux’s iptables so you hide your systems behind its firewall without having to run your main pc as a network host.
If you install Linux or Unix/BSD, you’re not running a vulnerable Win-OS version (which means basically everyone of them 
) so connecting the old machine to the network is perfectly fine. Even web access poses no more risks then more modern machines have.
You can, technically, set a system up as a remote disc reader, with some custom scripts creating a Samba/CIFS share for your Win-OS machine to access remotely, but that’s frankly beyond your current capabilities, TBH. Before tackling that, I’d suggest getting comfortable with Linux first, especially its command line, cuz’ that’s where yo’ll spend a lot of time learning and setting stuff up. 
Seconded. It’s not particularly hard to setup, does not require writing code compiling and packaging stuff…
… but probably might require you writing two or three scripts (mount and share, unshared and unmount, eject) and making shortcuts to plink or similar on Windows, to be able to invoke those from your windows system easily.
