These two threads are the most recent/active on this topic that I've seen:
Know anyone that does high value work on old machines?
Anecdotal accounts of Windows 7 on dual Tualatin rigs for everyday computing

In general I don't think there'd be any problems with using an older machine offline for whatever it can do - for example using an old Mac 6500 for word processing (it's not like Word 95 or Lotus Notes magically stopped being functional with age). No different than using such a machine for gaming methinks. It gets tricky when you want to bring the Internet, modern networking, etc into the equation. It may also be problematic if you have to deal with newer filetypes, like for example newer XML-enabled Office documents tend to be a problem for very old versions of Office.

Does a 2009 27" iMac count? 😁

Seem pretty retro compared to my laptop...

It's a fun challenge, but ultimately not very productive.

I used to use my old Pentium 3 for downloading pictures off of my mobile, but that ended when my old mobile finally died.
Then I use a couple Athlon64's for tasks like watching movies and as a backup/datacomputer for storing all of my files along with slipstreaming and burning Windows OS cd's

Old computers are too unreliable. I had a HDD die on me last week for example. I do use a Core 2 Duo (already outdated IMO) as a printer server though. 😀

My DOS machine sees use for all sorts of things. In fact gaming comes second now 😀 AdTrack2 is what I use it most for. Occasionally I make fancy desktop wallpapers in FRACTINT or technical drawings in AutoCAD 13 (which I can then print on the dot-matrix printer or the networked inkjet printer mapped to a virtual LPT2 port 😀)
Qbasic works pretty well as advanced graphical calculator and for quick prototyping, altough lately I've started to use Visual C# for the same purpose as well.
It's connected to the web too, but that doesn't see much use. Only when I need to download something directly to it, or when I can't use a Windows PC for whatever reason.

They can always be used as serial terminals for a com port or some session in putty. Get the authentic fan and hard drive noises along with the CRT.

In the end, the best reason for using an old computer would be the general lack of all distractions inherent in modern operating systems.

Of course, it's possible to set up a truly distraction-free environment on a modern system as well, but getting DOS set up on an i5 or what have you is a somewhat clumsy endeavor. There's probably a suitable Linux distribution that would accomplish the same, but offhand I wouldn't know what that would be.

I sometimes use my Toshiba 480CDT as a DOS based writing machine on the couch or whatever. My main issue with using old machines as productivity machines is that in the end, I need to get those files to other people in some way and format conversions plus all the hoops to jump through making sure it all comes out looking right makes it a chore. Unless I'm writing something I'll just print out and possibly OCR back into a modern format, it's too much work.

This is especially true for non-writing apps. I used to use my old Performa for a DB in Clarisworks until I realized I needed to migrate it to a modern machine with Excel. Lemme tell ya, that was not a fun process.

I'd really like to setup an old machine just for daily tasks and such because they can still perform admirably, but the passage of time and the whole "internet killed computers" thing I have in my head just makes me pause.

I use a Thinkpad 760EL with a 100mb zip drive for any MS office tasks. O and Doom 95 in between papers of course!

Using a Pentium 3 Machine with 800 Mhz als a Digital Video Recorder under Linux.

Very stable since 2002...

And a Pentium 3 500 MHz Machine (Desktop Case) with an SB-Live and CoolEdit connected to my Old Stereo to digitalize my Cassettes and Records.
OS is Win98SE and it runs smooth with 512 MB RAM.

Oh i forget:
I use Audio Machine as a Printer Server to, with converter from Postscript to GDI.
So i can Print from any Linux Machine to my Color-Laser which is Not supported by Linux.

Linux prints to a virtually Postscript Printer emulated by P3 500 MHz Machine.
The Picture is Rendered and then Send to the Laser-Printer via the Windows Driver.

ODwilly wrote:

I use a Thinkpad 760EL with a 100mb zip drive for any MS office tasks. O and Doom 95 in between papers of course!

Those are great fleamarket computers for finding old hard drives since nobody ever knows how to open them.

I'm kind of tempted to find an old AT-class laptop, toshiba 3100 or something of that era, just for old writing tasks.

Auzner: Haha that is funny! So simple it's impossible right? Mine has a 2gb Hitachi drive with the original install of 95. Used for Photoshop and AutoCad up until 2009 amazingly.

I do. I have a nice S370 pentium III 650 megahertz system with dual 40-gigabyte drives, voodoo3, and AWE64 gold that I use for everyday work. I have some athlon 2 - gigahertz systems but I only get those out of I want to do rendering or encoding 😀

Use to have a pentium 3 1ghz in 2010 for daily use (Compaq n600c laptop). It was fast, but that was only because I used Linux. Could play flash videos just fine, and had opengl acceleration (onboard radeon). Windows Xp and Vista could only dream of running Firefox and emulation without slowdown on a Pentium 3. Think the biggest speed up was recompiling everything with -msse, mfpmath=sse, and -msseregparm; somehow that really sped up image rendering and page scrolling, especially while a flash video was playing. Using xfce, it felt like a Pentium 4 3Ghz in Windows XP, and it even ran compiz just fine.

Linux can really let old machines shine like new. Especially Gentoo or a good bootstrap. Blows away Windows any day. Turning an old machine into a proxy server, router, and/or server comes to mind...

Staying with Windows XP and Office 2003 until last breath - although the computer hardware itself isn't necessarily old.

ODwilly wrote:

I use a Thinkpad 760EL with a 100mb zip drive for any MS office tasks. O and Doom 95 in between papers of course!

Good ol' Thinkpad keyboard indeed! 😀 I use a newer R50/T4x-generation though, and Writemonkey. Basically, a typewriter.