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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: 2) by VLM on Thursday April 30 2020, @03:37PM
I'm a little unclear why the answer isn't leave it on the desk and keep using it, right next to the new box.
An interesting angle on changing things is instead of changing the software change the hardware. Maxing out the motherboard memory AND buying a new SSD larger than the old spinning disk will cost less than a dinner and improve performance drastically. Maybe toss in a nice 3-d graphics card, not top of the line but enough to accelerate general use. If it did everything you needed it to do last year, making it 10 times faster this year should be quite adequate for a secondary machine.
Once you get used to multiple machines and multiple monitors its hard to go back, feels like chopping off one hand.