[geeks] Q about older PC hardware retention

[Lionel Peterson]

Just an out-of-the-blue question, but when it comes to older PC hardware, I've
got a couple questions:

1) For personal use, how old a machine would you hold on to, as defined by
processor age/class/generation?

2) For donation to an end-user charity (church, homeless group, battered
women's shelter, etc - NOT a tech recycling charity) how old a machine would
you consider donating?

For #1, I can easily argue for disposing of any Pentium III or earlier desktop
without hesitation. I pause at Pentium III Xeon servers and P4 machines.

For #2, I can't see donating to an end-user organization anything that won't
run Windows XP and Office 2003 comfortably, which means 2.0 GHz+ clock and at
least 1 Gig of RAM...

What are your thoughts?Where would you draw the line?

Of course an older machine w/ unique attributes is always worth keeping - I'm
asking more about commodity Dell, HP systems...