The beginnings of my FreeNAS

My wife had been giving me grief about all the computer parts I had laying around in our basement. Honestly, I just can't bring myself to throw away something that still works.

Even if it is this:
Asus A7V133 Motherboard (Socket A)
AMD Athalon 1200
640MB of PC-100 RAM
1x Quantum Fireball ATA66 15GB Hard Drive
1x Maxtor ATA100 15GB Hard Drive
Mitsumi CD-ROM
250W Power Supply
10/100 Intel Pro Network Interface Card (NIC)
Palit MX440 64MB PCI Video Card
And I'm pretty sure there's a Banshee in there cooling the cpu.

Weak-sauce, I know. But it still worked. And I'd feel bad just tossing it.

This was my wife's computer when we were in college and it's fallen by the wayside as I've built two computers since the time this computer was important to us. When I built my Windows 7 machine two years ago I needed a case for it. So I put my XP machine in my wife's computer case and put this hardware in a drawer (and then put my Windows 7 machine in my old-but-nice XP case.) Eventually I ended up getting a new case for my Windows 7 machine and put everything back. So yeah, I've had 3 computers laying around. I might as well find a use for them, or face throwing away something potentially useful.

First I needed an operating system for it. Originally, I was just going to install something on it and give it away to someone that needed it. However, the original operating system I had for this was Windows 2000. I have install disks for 98, 2000, XP Home, and XP Pro, but no extra CD-Keys. At one point I found one on the internet that worked for 2000, but I didn't feel right about doing that, much less giving a computer to someone that was so outdated and now illegitimate

I thought I'd install Linux and give it away. However, I never got Ubuntu 11.4 to install (more on why that didn't work later) and furthermore, the kind of person that would perceive a need for this old computer, probably wouldn't be able to use Linux:

Person - "How come I can't install this program I downloaded?"
Me - "Because that's a windows install package you're double clicking on. You're running Linux."
Person - "What's Linux?"

.....at least that's how I saw it in my mind anyway.

So there it sat with my wife urging me to do something with it or get rid of it.