Amongst others, I have a beautiful Carillon standing around. It's so old, it won't take Windows 7, so it's an XP machine, period. It seems like a sin to get rid of it with it's moulded aluminium 19" rack etc, but let's face it, it's not going to do anything my i7 Intel can't do...
 
What do you guys do with your old PCs? Turn it into a sock drawer perhaps?

Where I live the county will accept old PC's at their recycling center.  Just remove the hard drive or smash it to prevent someone getting into it.

Put Ubuntu Linux on it. Watch it fly. PC reborn.

Hmm.. now that sounds like interestingness, Doc. To ask a really silly questions - what do I then do with the machine? What can it do? Sorry - I am purely interested in practical uses, so please advise :O)

Type up letters, browse the internet, hack the NSA, become a developer. Download porn, turn it into a server, build an artificial intelligence, make it into an answer machine, play games, get it to send automated posts about drum maps in these forums. Sequence and make music probably. Anything windows can do.

The world is your oyster..

Cheers..

All my home computers are old... so I use them as "normal computers"
 
PS. If you do not miss Vista, I can not recommend Ubuntu. Take Knoppix instead. You can use that for virus free Internet browsing with a guarantee that nothing from your activity is kept locally (till you enable "write to local disk").

And why no love for Ubuntu?

Ubuntu is just another Linux distribution, and probably the most popular. It's extremely user friendly for newbies, and very configurable.

For creative types Ubuntu studio has a number of great packages and is optimized for latency, and probably the best of it's kind.. I notice many of the people here who use Linux use it (I do).

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UbuntuStudio/FAQ

Linux is hardly a hotbed when it comes to viruses, but for the paranoid there is a free version of bitdefender available for most distributions.

I sell mine, because I get Shiny New Toy Syndrome(tm) really bad with computers and buy new tech all the time. So the old ones are still worth using for other people.
 
Well, to be more accurate, I sell the parts, since I don't buy new systems, just buy parts to upgrade the one I have. I upgrade it piecemeal whenever I see something I decide I want.

Doktor Avalanche
And why no love for Ubuntu?

This thread is about old computers... Modern Ubuntu versions comes with fancy desktop. It has memory leaks and can consume more then 3GB of RAM after a while. On my 2GB notebook I had to switch on swap after upgrade to 14.x

LJB
Hmm.. now that sounds like interestingness, Doc. To ask a really silly questions - what do I then do with the machine? What can it do? Sorry - I am purely interested in practical uses, so please advise :O)

Put Harrison's MixBus3 on it, with of all its plugins you'll have a cool mastering work station.