You know it’s true: Look around your church long enough and you are going to find someone using a computer that is older than Moses.
There is probably a church secretary out there still using Windows 98, or a maintenance guy who was unaware Apple ever upgraded beyond OS 9.
Most IT departments fall under one of three prevailing philosophies:
- Upgrade everyone as soon as possible.
- Upgrade people on some sort of time-based cycle.
- If it ain’t broke, why would you get an upgrade?
If your church is smaller, you probably operate under the third philosophy. And that is OK, there is no shame there! Until an ill-fated lightening strike a couple months ago, the computer our church used for slides was an old Win2K server. Lightening fried the logic board which paved the way to a new uni-body Mac Mini.
An act of God indeed.
When money is tight, there is a need to creatively use old technology.
Some people have gone above and beyond being creative to stretch the dollars through another fiscal quarter. Some things may be a little absurd, but hey, they work.
Here are a few things I have heard about and seen lately:
- Using a Windows 98 machine with an old Creative Live Drive to record sermons.
- Buying $10 drive enclosures to re-purpose old 40gb hard drives as external storage.
- Using a HP DL380 with 35gb RAIDed SCSI drives as a cheap web server (using Ubuntu Server of course).
- Using old Blue Tooth receivers to make local printers wireless.
- Upgrading really old desktops with a laptop that has a broken screen and docking station.
- Converting Pentium 3 systems into thin clients for public use.
- A first gen Mac Mini with a 1TB external drive being used to run a security camera.
- Using an old Pentium 2 as a firewall (honestly, I don’t think it worked as well as its creator thought it would, but it might be worth a shot).
- A CD duplicator (granted, it only had four CD Burners in it…and it was kind of slow).
What about you? How do you re-use old technology around your church? What is the oldest piece of equipment you have? What will you do when it finally bites the dust for good?
Go on ahead, now is a great time to confess your ultimate frugalness.
hmmmm – i’m unloading a rack of older servers next week if anyone needs some new (old) toys to try these out.
You mentioned to using Ubuntu in #3. You can also repurpose desktops as well. In fact, you can do a lot with an old computer with a new version of Linux. You not only save the cost of buying new computers by re-purposing old computers, but you also save the environmental impact as well.
Kevin
http://opensourcechurch.com
This is true, I have used XUbuntu to revive a few old machines as well. Good point.
re-using our older computers as f1 checkin stations, they take forever to boot (like 2+ minutes) but once f1 checkin is running things are fine!
I also forgot to mention that goodwill offers free e-cycle up where i live http://www.seattlegoodwill.org/donate/donateitems/ecyclewashington
I am not sure about Good Will in these parts (SW Ohio), I do know there is a place around here that takes old cat 5 cables and gives you cash for ‘em.
As for #8 with the firewall, I’m not sure how a P2 would fare, but I had a firewall that was a first gen Athlon with 512MB RAM running Untangle and as long as I didn’t stack too many services it did just fine. I imagine if you could squeeze 2GB RAM on a board with a P2 just the firewall would still do a good job.
One of my favorite things that I think is so often overlooked is NComputing, http://www.ncomputing.com. If you have multiple Windows or Linux work stations it’s a quick way to setup and deploy virtual work stations. Eases IT management headaches by reducing the amount of work stations to update etc.
I have a love/hate with ncomputing. I used there Xtenda devices and cried…a lot. However, their expanions (sp?) where absolutely wonderful.
I have been thinking about making and enclosure for a old laptop I got so I can mount it on the wall. The purpose would be to use it to display my Google calender. It would update/sync when I make changes to it on my iPod touch, laptop, or desktop.