Jap Box
Hey all 
Just acquired 8 desktop PC's from helping to clear out an office, all minus hard drives obviously.
Im looking at turning a few into media center PC's to stream around the house as weve got multiple TV's dotted around and the AV senders dont work properly anymore because the wireless router interferres with it.
Out of the 8 units I know the following:
2 are AMD Athlon XP
1 is AMD Sempron
1 is Pentium III
The rest are unknown, how would I go about finding the specs of them etc without bothering to take apart cases etc? Any kind of bootable CD such as damn small linux? Will these show the specs?
Also, whats the best option to network them and what OS to put on them all, basically just need them to boot up and read some .avi files. All have wireless networking cards in them. I assume id use one as a server and the others il stuff some shoddy drives in just so they boot and allow them to read/write from the one being used as the server. Would any live CD work for this?
Havent done anything like this for a whole so im quite out of date on what to do haha.
Any help appreciated
Also, the one PC upon turning it on simply beeps 10 times, then stops, then beeps again. I cant for the life of me figure out what the problem is, everythings plugged in correctly and its just missing the hard drive so should happily boot just to BIOS like the rest have.
Just acquired 8 desktop PC's from helping to clear out an office, all minus hard drives obviously.
Im looking at turning a few into media center PC's to stream around the house as weve got multiple TV's dotted around and the AV senders dont work properly anymore because the wireless router interferres with it.
Out of the 8 units I know the following:
2 are AMD Athlon XP
1 is AMD Sempron
1 is Pentium III
The rest are unknown, how would I go about finding the specs of them etc without bothering to take apart cases etc? Any kind of bootable CD such as damn small linux? Will these show the specs?
Also, whats the best option to network them and what OS to put on them all, basically just need them to boot up and read some .avi files. All have wireless networking cards in them. I assume id use one as a server and the others il stuff some shoddy drives in just so they boot and allow them to read/write from the one being used as the server. Would any live CD work for this?
Havent done anything like this for a whole so im quite out of date on what to do haha.
Any help appreciated
Also, the one PC upon turning it on simply beeps 10 times, then stops, then beeps again. I cant for the life of me figure out what the problem is, everythings plugged in correctly and its just missing the hard drive so should happily boot just to BIOS like the rest have.
