I’ve had a blog on this old server for almost a whole decade. If you include how long I used it as a web server maybe it would be closer to 11 or 12 years. WordPress has been running for 6 years.
My attachment to the server must either come to an end or change shape as this old server is failing. Its rebooting a few times a day and it frequently locks up. It is still very useful as a web server for this old blog, a sirius radio media streamer, Tversity movie streamer and as an expendable place to download stuff that could contain viruses. I mean torrents. I would hate to expose my good PCs to likes of torrents.
The good news is that I’ve converted it into a VMware workstation so as a virtual windows XP it can run inside my regular clean fast desktop and still perform all the same functions less the problems and power consumption. This post was submitted using the new virtual workstation!!!
If you are interested in creating your own virtual environment to play around in, trash or convert an old PC with valuable data then perhaps this is the way to go for you.
http://www.vmware.com/products/player/
You can also download a VMware tool that you install on your old PC and it will create the virtual disks for you. Then you need to copy them to you nice and fast Windows 7 machine to run them. I used a copy of Paragon Copy Drive to convert the servers harddrive to virtual drives.
Note that if you want to run your virtual pcs as a service (running all the time) then you will need to get a copy of VMWare workstation 7.
Denis Buchwald's Weblog 