Obligatory Lemmy answer: Install Linux.

Seriously, though, it's a great way of learning if you decide to set it up as a NAS

If you don't need it, secure wipe it and give it to a thrift store. Maybe if you're extra nice you can put a stripped down distro on it. Really your call. But someone in your area could use it, for sure.

Good on you OP for letting all these autistic people genuinely feel like they are telling someone about linux for the first time.

There's love in this world <3

If it was mine, I'd set it up to run legacy console emulators for NES, SNES, Sega, etc. Good luck finding ROMs these days though, the big gaming companies keep having such sites shut down ☹️

As much as I would love to see things repurposed, this thing is a dinosaur, and you’d be better off for both yourself and the environment to just recycle it and get a Raspberry Pi or something which can probably run circles around it at 10% of the power budget. You don’t need to keep something old to learn something new.

Boat anchor.

If I'm looking at the board correctly, you can install 4 1gb DDR memory sticks and 4 SATA drives. It will be a bit pokey, but I envision a TrueNAS with 1 SSD and 3 2 TB+ spinning drives set as ZFS RAID-Z1. Rip all your DVDs and use jellyfin to watch them.

Plex server. Especially good for parents if you have digitized movies and music.

Set it up with netBSD.

Connect some large drives to it and use it as a file server.

Host something on it such as matrix or if you have enough ram a game server.

Use it as a retro game console, a quick look at the specs online suggests it should be able to run PS1 games and older fine.

If you're into home automation, you could use it as a command and control center.

Could be used as a jellyfin server but you'd potentially need to transcode everything in advance.

Oh! There‘s probably someone who wants this to play a specific game they have lying around as a CD-ROM. Nerds are like that, always needing the time appropriate hardware for their games.

Yes, I do own a low latency CRT TV to play smash melee, why?

Pihole, file server, Home Assistant/Music Assistant + Jellyfin.

Others have said NAS, and it might be a bit slow, but it would probably be a fun little project. If it has any PCI-Express slots open, you could maybe find a Gigabit network card somewhere and throw that in, since I'm sure that thing has a 100Mbit connection.

Having a 64-bit processor really opens up the number of distros you can install lol. As someone else had said, keep in mind the power usage of something that old.

"Obviously I can’t connect it to the internet with Windows XP"

Why not? I was on the Internet starting in 1988.

Probably full of unpatched security holes, but you COULD...

Old software here:

http://www.oldversion.com/