Creating a budget media center PC

[awelsh]

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.

Havent done anything like this for a whole so im quite out of date on what to do :P

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.

[Jack!]

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.

Havent done anything like this for a whole so im quite out of date on what to do :P

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.

Could be the Battery. (@Bold bit)

XMBC, probably the best to use.

[Chippiewill]

XMBC, probably the best to use.

This. XBMC isn't very taxing. I doubt you'll be able to get 1080p pumped out of them though, maybe 720p though.

---------- Post added 16-08-2012 at 11:51 AM ----------


Also, the one PC upon turning it on simply beeps 10 times, then stops, then beeps again
CMOS shutdown Read/Write error (http://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch000239.htm)

Always google beep codes. I'd actually assume it's the battery to begin with.

[awelsh]

Beeping turned out to be the RAM :P didnt look over properly and found out one edge was poking out lol

Anyway, im looking to use one for some light gaming, such as wow on low settings.

Whats the best processor option to go for? From the following ive got:

Pentium 4 2.0GHZ
Intel celeron 2.4GHZ
AMD Sempron
AMD athlon

Obviously RAM, GFX etc are all sorted anyway as I can just interchange them around.

Did have it on the pentium 4 before and it was running pretty smooth on ratherhigh settings, but will any of the others be better? No point forking out on a new machine if thats all im using it for.

[Jack!]

I would say the Pentium.