[mbonwick]

Right,
As I posted elsewhere, my BIOS decided to die and the repair place have said there's no hope.

So, I've now got a 7 year old PC sitting doing nothing. I'd like to turn it into a server.

Specs are:
Socket 478 Intel P4 2.0GHz
Gigabyte GA-8ID 533 (which WILL have to be replaced)
1x 256MB and 1x512MB sticks of SD RAM
60GB Maxtor and 250GB WD IDE Hard drives
2x LG IDE Optical drives
nVIDIA m64 32MB AGP graphics

PSU I'm not sure of.

Now, as the motherboard has to change, so will RAM, graphics, possibly drives (depending on the number of IDE conenctions). I'd like to keep the P4 as it's a solid chip, but I suppose that's highly unlikely.

Thoughts please.

[SocialWarfare]

Cant you change the bios chip?

[Carbon]

Frankly it isn't worth it. If you just want a file server go to a thrift store, grab pretty much anything from a P3 onwards, and shove a couple drives in it. No point paying a moderate sum just to replace the motherboard in a PC that performance-wise isn't going to matter in the role you're putting it in.

If you really want to spend money, build a cheap, low-power X2 240 system in a nice case and shove a bunch of 1TB Green drives into it or whatever.