With the price of memory and storage rising rapidly with no hope of relief visible in the near future, it makes more sense than ever to try and get the most out of your old PC hardware instead of buying something new.
Here are 3 great uses for that old Windows 10 PC you just retired, or that Optiplex that has been sitting in a closet gathering dust for a few years.
Build your own Network Attached Storage (NAS)
A Network Attached Storage device (usually just called a NAS) is a storage device that connects to your local network like any other computer. The major difference is the intended purpose.
A NAS is specifically designed to provide your own personal cloud storage solution, so instead of paying Microsoft or Google, you buy a few hard drives and throw them in an old PC. I've had very good luck purchasing refurbished or recertified drives from ServerPartDeals -- none have died, even after many years of use.
Typically, a NAS doesn't require a whole lot of processing power, so most any old PC will do. That is especially true if you just want something that can act as a backup solution for your files and photos.
That makes a NAS a great job for a PC that might otherwise sit in the closet collecting dust or wind up thrown in the garbage.
Related Don't throw away your old PC -- it makes a better NAS than anything you can buy
Doing it yourself is way more cost effective.
Posts 31 By Nick Lewis Nov 28, 2025
Some people use their NAS for more than a simple storage solution, and the upgradability of a regular desktop (even an older one) can be really helpful. For example, many people have their NAS working double-duty as a media server. Oftentimes, media servers will need to transcode video so it can be played back on another device on the network.
Sometimes it is worth upgrading an older PC to work as a streaming media server in addition to a NAS, since it is usually as simple as throwing in some extra RAM and an inexpensive GPU.
Run a game server
Many modern games are notorious for their poor optimization, which makes some of them difficult to run even on high-end systems.
However, even if the game itself is difficult to run, the multiplayer server is usually much easier. As a result, your average desktop from the Windows 10 era is a perfectly capable game server, especially if you remove Windows 10 and install Linux instead, since Linux is typically lighter than Windows.
If you have a system with enough RAM, you can often get away with running more than one game server on a single PC without too much of a problem. I have an old Ryzen 1600x (a six-core PC) with 24GB of RAM that I've used as a game server. It had no issue keeping up with a Minecraft server and a Valheim server simultaneously, plus a handful of other miscellaneous services.
Unlike a lot of self-hosting and homelabbing applications, a game server can't normally take advantage of a fancy GPU, so there is no point in buying one specifically for this use. In fact, if you set up your server for remote access over SSH, you don't need a GPU at all in your game server.
If you've never hosted your own game server before, Valve has done an incredible job making the setup process more approachable with SteamCMD. It is often as simple as tweaking a few text files to set some basic server settings and then running the server executable.
Out of every way I've put my old PC to use, game servers are by far and away the ones I've enjoyed the most.
Related How to Start Your Own Minecraft Server for Multiplayer Gaming
Minecraft is a timeless classic, and you don't even need a crazy PC to host a server.
Posts Build a home lab for self-hosting
There are more self-hosted applications than you can shake a stick at, and the best part is that most of the best ones are free and widely supported on the internet. I'd recommend installing Proxmox to start, since it makes running separate virtual machines or containers for each application extremely user-friendly.
If you're willing to invest a little bit of time in learning how to set them up, you can save yourself hundreds of dollars per year in subscription services, and maintain your privacy while you're at it. One of my favorite uses has been a home media server.
As an added bonus, most self-hosted services don't actually require all that much computational power. You can run them on even a modest computer as long as it has enough RAM.
If you're willing to throw in a modern GPU, especially an NVIDIA RTX GPU, then you can even deploy and run your own artificial intelligence.
And those three options are just the beginning. Once you get started, there really aren't many hard limits on the kinds of things you can self-host on your own PC.
Related 7 Self-Hosted Apps I Run 24/7
Uptime is king.
Posts 4 By Patrick Campanale Jun 28, 2025