ARM or x86 fro embedded??

Hi,,

I am a embedded Linux hobbyist with ARM, and I ave decided to buy a development board to work at home.
I checked the ARM boards and seem to be expensive with good specifications.
I thought that if I buy an old PC and use it as an embedded board to run Linux it would be much cheaper and i will have all the peripherals (USB, parallel, Serial, IDE, , etc...).
what do u think?

Thanks

There's nothing wrong with using an old x86 pc, but an ARM takes much less power. What features do you want? There are numerous ARM boards with different hardware (and prices).

In order to know what features you want, you'll need to know some stuff about what kind of embedded that you want to do. If you really want to do deep embedded, then the old PC probably won't do anything for you apart from maybe giving you some practice in cross compiling C and downloading object files.

On the other hand, if you think that embedded is linux in kiosk mode with a browser as the only functionality, then an old PC would probably be a much easier place to start.

you first should decide what do you want to learn...
then you can make sure do you realy need by a new device....
if you just want to learn linux, the x86 is enough.....