Yep thats right, I moved it into the garage.
Sometimes it's just not worth trying (when your server is an 8 year old P200 for example).
Happy to report complete success

but doesn't the sound bother you when you're working on the car, or taking out the trash?

..or fetching potatoes?

I have a 6-year old P2-400MHz. All it needed was a new HD (which it needed anyway, because 8GB isn't as impressive as it used to be) and a new fan.

Dumb question.... what would one do with such a system? I'm not joking, I'm curious.

I've never trashed a computer because there was something wrong with it, only because it was old and too damn slow.
First was a Comodore XT, then a 286 clone, followed by a 386 clone, then a Dell P450 that I pawned off on my parents. Is anything pre 95 really all that useful anymore?

Q2 - a P2-400 has got to be more than 6 years old, or does it just seem longer?

hehe, that's a tried and true (and easy ) solution. i have my web server in the garage for the same reason. it's a PII 300, and the fan on that old slot 1 is really loud. that's my next silencing project, when i upgrade the components, but until then i can barely hear it through the thick concrete walls. (j/k) it stays nice and cool out there, too.

True, it ain't about to overheat (it just snowed here heh).

It's actually quite useful. Besides this old P2-400MHz machine, I have a desktop, two laptops, a TiVo, and a Sony PS2 (but the PS2 doesn't really fit in here).

On this old P2-400MHz machine, I installed Linux, and it is the 24x7 server for my home network:

- Home Media Option server for TiVo (photos on my TV and MP3s on my stereo system).
- DHCP server for the other computers.
- DNS server for the other computers (internally, so they can find each other).
- Squid web proxy cache for other computers.
- Backup server for the other computers.

None of it is performance-intensive stuff, so 400MHz is just fine. All in all, not bad for a machine about to be thrown out of the office

Yeah, well that one runs IPCop which provides routing, firewall, IDS, DHCP, internal and external DNS, traffic shaping, proxy and cache and more.
The maximum CPU usage for the last day was 9% so a P200 is probably overdoing it heh. The more RAM the better though, because then you can have a larger cache. That one has 96MB.

I'm currently building Gentoo on a PIII 550 with 512MB RAM and a 20GB hd that work was going to throw out.
A little bit of fiddling with samba and it will become the network fileserver and backup storage, and will also live in the garage (administration by SSH and VNC).