Running XP of course.  Still work great, infact one is still chugging with my Sonar 7.  Will soon be upgrading.

Rather than *throw* these away... and I'm not sure if anyone would want them for free...   what use are they nowadays?
 
BTW, running XP doesn't seem to like streaming Youtubes and such with IE8 or even Chrome, which is up to date.
Otherwise, be good surfing computers

They are as useful as they have ever been. They will run almost any really useful business application, home network servers or storage, some older games that will not run on newer stuff, can be re-purposed for Linux boxes etc. I finally upgraded from Windows 2000 on most of my machines last year, and still run Office 2000 on the Win 7 machines I have now. Win 2K was doing everything I needed, but I was using those machines to surf as well, and was a bit leery of an un-patched system when almost all the anti-virus programs stopped supporting Win2K.
 
What they may not be good for is the kind of entertainment toy that computers have become of late. Contemporary high demand gaming, etc. They are not probably your first choice for surfing due to the security risk from an impending cutoff of support for XP by Microsoft, and as you note the increasing demands of high bandwidth internet apps. 

mixmkr
...one is still chugging with my Sonar 7...

I suggest hanging on to this one with Sonar 7 installed.  If some of your existing projects won't load up properly in your future setup, you know they will work here.

The obvious use is utility servers - backups, print and file services, etc, as stated above.

A not so obvious application is running some plug-ins. I'd seriously consider keeping one for 32 bit plug-ins. You can link them to your DAW across the network, and it is possible to keep latency to a manageable level.
 
Have fun!

mixmkr
Running XP of course.  Still work great, infact one is still chugging with my Sonar 7.  Will soon be upgrading.

Rather than *throw* these away... and I'm not sure if anyone would want them for free...   what use are they nowadays?
 
BTW, running XP doesn't seem to like streaming Youtubes and such with IE8 or even Chrome, which is up to date.
Otherwise, be good surfing computers

You might want to consider donating the PCs.
That would give you a tax write-off and it would help others...

thx Jim... 
btw, order placed!