With the passage of time, in the end all PCs and laptops end up becoming obsolete and we have to buy a new one. In that case, what should you do with your old PC ? In this article we are going to tell you the steps you should follow to convert an old PC into a home server of what you need, and without spending any money.
The concept ” home server ” is tremendously broad, and there it will depend on you and your needs. For example, you could create a server for streaming multimedia on your home devices, a file, download, FTP, Minecraft server … whatever you can think of. That is in your hands, because what we are going to explain next are the guidelines and recommendations when preparing the old equipment to turn it into what you need.
Thoroughly clean your “new” home server
With use it is inevitable that dirt enters the PC, and if we talk about an old PC it is quite likely that it is quite dirty. The first step you should take is a thorough cleaning of your old PC and, in fact, if you have some experience in assembling hardware, you should completely disassemble each one of its parts to be able to clean them correctly, and reassemble everything again. time clean.
Even if you do not have experience, you should open the equipment and clean it well inside, being careful not to damage or disconnect anything, in order to keep it as clean – and quiet – as possible and so that it can continue working for as long as possible .
Optional: install more disks
Since you are going to open the equipment to clean it from the inside, and always depending on the use that you are going to give to your “new” home server, it may be a good idea to take advantage of installing more storage, as long as you have unused hard drives at home. In this way, you will provide the pc with a greater storage capacity that you can take advantage of, and this will be especially useful if you intend to use it as a file storage server or as a multimedia server.
Likewise, this optional step will depend on whether you have hard drives available, as well as if there is space in the box to install them, if the board has enough SATA connectors, and if you have cables (both power and data) available.
Format the PC
Based on the fact that you have bought a new PC and that you already have it working with everything you need, we assume that you no longer have to back up any data from the old PC that you are going to reuse, so the next step is to format it. . In this way, you will have a clean and ready-to-operate operating system, with no remains of programs or documents.
If you are clear about what you are going to use your home server for, you can take advantage of the situation to install the operating system that suits you best. For example, if you want an FTP or Minecraft server you don’t need Windows and a Linux distribution will work better for you, actually. It depends on your needs, preferences and knowledge, but in any case the recommendation is that if you are going to reuse an old PC as a home server, format it to have it “clean” also at the software level.
Set up your home server
You already have the equipment clean inside and out, so now it’s time to configure it. A server can serve many different things, but the recommendation is that you configure it for a single purpose. In other words, if you want to use it as a domain controller, for example, don’t configure it at the same time as a Minecraft server , and of course don’t install unnecessary software like the Office package.
Taking into account that we are talking about an old PC, surely its performance is not too high, and therefore the fewer things you have installed and the fewer tasks we require, the better.