Digital Trends

With the holidays over, many of you may be sitting at home reading our Website on a new computer. With a new system, web pages load so much quicker, CDs burn faster and games play smoother.

Your old computer may seem like its only use is as a boat anchor now and you're ready to throw it to the curb. The truth is, while your old computer might not be able to play the latest games or be fast enough for your daily tasks, it still is quite useful.

Besides having slower and older components, most old computers seem so much slower because of all of the junk that has accumulated on the hard drive.

If you've had a computer for several years, no doubt you've installed and uninstalled many applications and written, copied, moved and deleted many files. A clean install of an operating system will bring that computer back to life. Once you've copied your documents and data over to your new computer, wipe that hard drive clean and install a new operating system.

Learn a new operating system

When you're ready to install a new operating system on that old computer you could just re-install the OS that was on it before. But here's a great chance to learn something new. If you've always wanted to learn how to use Linux, this is a great opportunity to do it. You won't have to worry about ruining something on your main computer and you can take as long as you want to work on it.

There are many versions of Linux, and most of them offer free downloads. A good place to start is LinuxISO.org, a Website that provides downloads and links to most of the popular Linux distributions. I've used Mandrake Linux for a few years now and it is one of the easiest to install and learn. You may also want to take a look at other operating systems like FreeBSD, Slackware or Gentoo. Sun has recently started to offer their Solaris operating system as a free download for developers and educational use. Even Microsoft has a free OS you can try. Their latest server OS, Windows Server 2003 is available for a free six-month trial download.

There are even some Linux ports for Apple hardware. Yellow Dog Linux is a Linux distribution made specifically for a Power PC based Mac. I've installed it on a 400MHz Powerbook G3 and it really livened up the system. It has a Mac look to it so it's very easy for Mac users to learn it.