SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
https://www.pcmag.com/news/avoid-the-trash-heap-15-great-uses-for-an-old-pc
In 2019, after seven years of slumps, PC sales went up by the tiniest increment—0.3 percent. Demand then surged in recent weeks as people shifted to work-from-home setups due to COVID-19 quarantines. Which means some of you may be getting a new computer. But what do you do with the old PC?
You may be tempted to go the easy route and just junk it. But don't. If that laptop or desktop was created any time in the last decade, you'd be surprised by how much life you (or others) can get out of it. I'm not talking about limping along, but of ways to bring an old PC back to useful life.
[This editor can vouch for plenty of life in old boxes. For the past 4 years, a now-nearly-decade-year-old Core 2 Duo Laptop with 6 GB RAM has been my primary computer.--martyb]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Rich on Thursday April 30 2020, @06:19AM
I had (actually still have, but misplaced somehow) a //c that I got for free when they were cleaned out for Wintels in an office. It's got an 8 MHz ZIP chip, real-time clock, and a RAMWorks III (iirc) compatible memory extension to 320K that I designed myself (upper bank of 4164 went out, 41256 went in, pin 1 bent up, and 4 TTL chips generated the banked address; I wonder how I managed to do that back then...).
The little thing usually had a fast-load floppy inserted that booted into AppleWorks Classic within 8 seconds from cold mains that held my contact data and scratch notes. I already had a IIgs and a Mac Plus around that time, but the speed was just so much more convenient.
This post got written on a 2009 MacBook Pro, 2,53 C2D, 8 GB RAM, 512 GB SSD. Absolutely good enough for everything everyday work, there's an even older Q6600 (probably Intel's finest ever) Linux box under the desk, which could use (but doesn't really need) some RAM and an upgrade from spinning rust storage, and finally a 2012 (does that count as "old Apple computer?) Retina MacBook Pro with recent XCode for a customer project.
But, from the TFA: "You may need to do some light upgrades here and there; more RAM and a big new storage drive may benefit some (okay, probably all) of these projects." (Their emphasis - but one can see why the 2012 one might be the last Apple computer around here).
I might clear out two millennium era PC boxes, that I kept for their true parallel port to drive stepper motors. I guess that's something exclusively for Arduinos and RasPis these days, and one really doesn't need to lug 10 kilos around anymore.