Hi! This is Chris from vitamincm.com and today we are going to learn how to use your old computer as a multi purpose server and we are going to learn how to control this server remotely from another computer using free software.
So let us say you buy a new computer for your house and you hook it all up. Well you are probably wondering “what shall I do with this old computer?” and you might think maybe throw it out, give it away, donate it to somewhere. Well, there are a couple of things that you can do with it that are pretty useful still. You can use it as backup server to back up your other computers on the network. You can use it to make centralized media hub that will store your photos, music and videos and the nice thing about it is we are going to do this using hardware that you already own, so your old computer, the new computer you bought and your router and the other thing is we are going to use free and simple to set up software to do this.
So what is in up for you? Well, one of the things is you can save money instead of buying one of those back up hard drives or some fancy back up server to store all your stuff and you can do it for free with stuff you already own.
Two you can save space, so instead of having to have two computers hooked up with, two monitors, two keyboards, two mice and all that. You can do it with only one and another nice benefit once you set it up to run back ups you will never loose your important files again so all those photos, videos, music, documents your financial information. You would not loose that should one of your computers crash and the other thing is there is one last thing for you to throw on a land fill which is also always nice.
So why do you need to do this. Well, you need stuff that you pretty much already own, your old computer, the new computer you bought, monitor, keyboard, mouse, some network cables and a router and one optional thing that you might want to do is buy a new hard drive for the old computer. A really large one since you are going to use it to back up a bunch of files from your new computer and maybe any other computers you have on the network. So that is really only the extra thing you are going to have to buy if you want to.
So first thing you want to do is to set up the old hardware. You are going to want to start with the old computer first, so connect the old computer to the router. Connect the new computer to the router and then connect the old computer using the keyboard, the monitor and the mouse and turn it on. Then you are going to want to set up the software so we are going to do that in a couple of steps, we are going to start off using the old computer. We will download software to the old computer or install it on the old computer, we will configure it to run and then we need to find out the IP address of the old computer so we will see how to do all that.
Then we are going to take that off all apart, plug the monitor and the keyboard and the mouse into the new computer, start it up. We will download the software to the new computer, we will configure it and then we will connect it to the old computer and start control. Okay, so let us get started.
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