Ancient Xeons - still useful and cheap
I cobbled together some upgrades to a Dell Precision 530 workstation that was destined for the scrapheap. The final revision of the motherboard, from 2001 (!), plus a pair of 3GHz Socket 604 Xeons. The HDD's are a bunch of 15k RPM SCSI monsters, and video upgraded to the best AGP Radeon card I could find. This was all topped off with some riser cards and 4GB of RAMBUS RIMM's.
The parts for this lot came from ebay and scavenging, and cost less than £40.
Despite the age it still runs Win7 32bit every bit as snappily as my i7-6700k. Obviously you can forget games from this decade but older stuff still behaves. And it's more than good enough for internet/office type tasks. Yes, it's a bit power hungry, and yes, a bit noisy, but that's besides the point.
So, against that backdrop why on earth would anyone without an interest in cutting edge software consider upgrading? The only reason is hardware failure. I should also point out that I have replaced friends & family PC's with either Macs or custom build Win7 towers in preference to letting anyone suffer the horrors of zero control in Win10.
I also cite the change of the world from purchasing licensed software to subscription as a major factor in dropping PC support. Adobe, MS, even AutoDESK have all gone this road and none of us want it. I mean, why bother upgrading when you can get a permanent copy of Office 2010 that does everything you need and then some for not a lot. And it's a damn sight nicer than permanent subscriptions just to use MY damn computer.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
