I don't really like the title, if anyone has a better idea for it, do tell.

I have an extra computer in my room that doesn't have internet, and is pretty much only good for working with large amounts of data (imo). It's about 10 years old, has Puppy Linux and WinXP (very dumbed down version, has nearly nothing on it and is slow as molasses). I've been trying to think of things I could use it for, but the only thing I thought of is to have it try to crack the Nspire RSA. Any ideas?

Salvage the parts and start a parts collection. Eventually, you can build a custom computer for almost free!

Eh, I'm not really fond of that idea. I would rather keep it working until I had all the parts to build a computer. Anything else?

Use it for x86 programming.

You could do that, x86 or z80 programming. If it has a parallel port, you could experiment with interfacing custom hardware over the parallel port, which is always a fun projcet.

Sounds fun I'll try it later. But if I'm just doing data processing, what would be some good data to process?

I feel like an old laptop is probably just about the worst candidate for doing data processing. What about calculating digits of pi?

Oooh, I'll do that

If you know where one is, do share. I was looking for it a long time ago, but never found it.

Have you tried out Super Pi? There's a bunch of benchmarking program for calculating pi; that's one of them.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_PI