Features

If you follow the industry average, you probably replace your PC every three years. This means that once every 36 months, you abandon your old, wheezing, dilapidated desktop in favour of something sleek, modern, and about three times as fast.

But what do you do with your old machine? Some people simply junk them, which is a huge waste given that this is something that probably cost more than £1,000 new. Or, old machines are given away to relatives, charities, or other good homes. But some old machines just get left in a cupboard, gathering dust, acting as little more than an expensive doorstop.

However, for less than £100, or in some cases absolutely nothing, you can get that old machine performing usefully again. For many tasks don't need a 3GHz Pentium 4, and in fact some computing tasks would simply be a waste of processing time for a modern fast machine. In this feature, we show you how to get an old machine working for you - as a firewall, a home media hub, or as an intrusion-detection system for the office. None of these projects will cost much in the way of money, and all can make a five- or even ten-year-old PC a useful machine again.