What do you do with your old PCs when you build or buy a new one?

Do you keep them for other things? Try to sell them on ebay or other places? Give them to friend's or relations, store them away somewhere just in case you might need them later? or just throw them away?

I know some people only ever have one PC and just upgrade it when needed, using the same case and harddrives, and replacing the motherboard, CPU, graphics card etc, and then selling the older stuff on ebay. Are you one of those? I've never been one to do that. I tend to build a new PC from the beginning each time, meaning I end up with one more PC each time. And even when I reuse a good case for a new system I tend to end up buying another case to then house the old hardware!

The problem I have is that I'm sentimental. If I've had a PC as my main system for a couple of years it has some great memories and was built and configured well to be stable and reliable, and was used daily. And therefore I find it really hard to part with. A bit like the reason we are all still holding on to our retro hardware and Amigas I suppose.

But I'm now getting too many PCs that are just never being used. And I even now have two complete PC setups without cases that are pretty good spec and in good working order, because I had to remove them to reuse the cases for newer systems.

The other problem is that some of the very old PCs are just not worth anything to anyone any more. I still have my Pentium 2 system that I originally purchased for over £2000 in 1998 and was used as my main system until 2002. That was a great system at the time that lasted me well, and even after 2002 it was still used as a download server and was running 24/7 without a problem. But now it is never used. It sits in the corner of a closet collecting dust. It's probably not even worth the postage costs to most people, but to me it was a great system with loads of memories, that served me very well through university and for design work after leaving, and I'm not sure I could just throw any fully working PC out just because it is old and out of date hardware wise.

One idea I have just had is to create a little blog with a history of my computers on it. With pictures and details, plus my personally memories and experiences of using them. It wouldn't really be for people to read that much. More a way to retain the memory of the older systems. Then I probably would be OK with getting rid of the ones I definitely don't use any more. I've been wanting to create a blog for some time now to include things I'm interested in, and some sections on useful stuff, like how to configure 1and1 servers.
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