There’s a store nearby a Wal*Mart on Route I-35 in Austin. “Goodwill Computer Works” – run by the same Goodwill company that operates the thrift stores, has old technology, donated by people who don’t need it and sold at very low prices. It’s a veritable smorgasbord of DVD-Roms, Zip Drives, SDRam, 10 Gigabyte hard drives, ATI All-in-Wonder AGP cards, and copies of Windows NT 3.5.

Oh, and old computers. Tons of them – most from the Pentium 2 and Pentium 3 era, many of them donated by large companies who have upgraded from the old to the latest-and-greatest.

A posting on Slashdot got me wondering – what would you do with a whole bunch of old, obsolete tech? Donate them? Well, that’s a good tax write-off, but what if you could actually do something with them.

Here are ten things you can do with old technology such as Pentium 2 laptops.

1) The Wired Meeting Room

Wouldn’t it be nice to have an interdepartmental meeting where everyone had access to their email accounts – and could look up information when needed at a moment’s notice? What if you put a laptop in front of each seat in a six-person meeting room?

There are a number of ways this could be accomplished – if the laptops are capable of running a Web browser, any Web-based mail would work. Still another option would be to add a Webcam, Microphone and some form of VoIP software – allowing you to communicate with others across the corporate LAN, WAN, or Internet – that is, however, assuming that your network is performing well enough to handle the extra load.

Another option is to set the laptops up as dumb terminals and have them log in to a more robust server in the meeting room – or to their office computers at their desks!

2) Laptop Anywhere.

Again, take the laptops and set them up as dumb terminals to the user’s personal office computer – but this time, add WiFi and the user can then bring his or her work anywhere in the entire office building – or at least those areas in the office building covered by the WiFi network. And heading to another person’s office to collaborate on a project means that you don’t have to leave your own computer behind.

3) Monitor Performance at-a-glance

If you want to keep appraised of network performance, SNMP polling data, utilization – even live Web traffic, you could mount an old laptop to your wall and keep abreast of what you’re looking at. If these statistics can be determined via a terminal – that’s good, but anything that can be put into a Web browser can be shown by anything that can run a Web browser.

4) The Stock Ticker Of The Future

Sure, you could also use the above trick to monitor stock Web pages – and it would be much simpler than this route – but if you’re savvy enough, you could set up a small server box with the MythTV backend, install MythTV front-end on a series of laptops, and each of them can stream CNBC live. It’d take a lot of traffic but hopefully if you keep it on the relatively high throughput environment of a LAN, it’d be okay. Just make sure that you know what the effect will be on your network before you do this – video takes a lot of bandwidth.

5) Beowulf Cluster

It had to be said.

6) Digital Picture Frame (Suggested by Dan Brzoska)

If you don’t mind potentially wrecking the computer, there are more than a few tutorials on how to turn old laptops into digital picture frames – this tutorial from Popular Science shows how to set up the computer to grab the photos from someone’s Flickr stream, meaning you can update the photos from across the world.

7) Productivity Booster (Suggested by Jason Tanner)

Want a second monitor for the office? It may be hard to justify getting a second monitor that would cost the company $200-400 – but using a laptop the IT department was going to donate anyway is a much easier sell. You can do this a number of ways – Web-based e-mail works, althoughit’s possible to set up the computer as a dumb terminal to your work computer and have full access to your standard e-mail client, like Outlook.

8) Demo Server (Suggested by Manish Chacko)

If your company sells computer products, the dumb terminal trick can be used again to serve up demos of your products to customers when they come into the office. Why not let them play with the product themselves instead of watching you do it for them? They may come up with a question about how to use the product that they may not have asked otherwise.

9) Office Space

You know the scene I’m talking about.

10) Scrabble (Suggested by Jim Duster)

If all else fails, you can take the keyboards off of old laptops and pry them off to play Scrabble. Remember, you’ll need at least 12 “E” tiles – which means 12 keyboards.