What do you guys do with the truly old stuff. I have a bunch of stuff from the Intel Core 2 and 1st gen Core i7 days that I can’t for the life of me find a use for. It doesn’t seem like it’s worth anything on ebay, so is it just e-waste at this point?
Sell, give away, stick on the wall… Create an L1 NAS for the community.
If some of the components look cool you could decorate with them. Other than that I don´t know what you could do with it seems pretty useless at this point.
It´s not old at all, but I have a dead x470 CROSSHAIR VII HERO hanging on the wall now. That´s where the decoration idea is coming from.
I keep stuff that has a nostalgia value (like my old 4,3GB SCSI HDD +Adaptec 2940 controller or my 5.25" floppy). Mostly single components.
I cleaned up my “cable box” (which are actually 3 boxes) and some really old stuff a year ago. I kept a VGA cable, but flat band cables, external SCSI cables, ISA/VLC cards all went into the dumpster.
I don’t keep much stuff around these days. I usually buy stuff that is running 7 years on average and I plan to reuse components (like drives, PSU,fans). And power efficiency on those old machines is just atrocious compared to modern gear, which is why I usually ask neighbors or family if they have a use for it before it hits the land fill. Even if that old Xeon/quad core makes a great router, running that thing is more expensive than buying proper stuff.
2 PCs incl. keyboard+mouse, an old laptop and in the last 5 years or so + the cable box cleanup.
What’s done is done. But that 120GB SATA SSD from like 8 years ago is still up and running fine as a boot drive.
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Electronics like you described, I usually try to sell for a very small price online or for pick up, not free, free attracts the worst kind of people. When nobody wants it after a couple month it goes into the bin that goes to the recycler soon.
Maybe ask @E-Wasted for advise.
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I am decommissioning most of my DDR3 systems with the exception of 1 gaming PC which one of my kids is using. Though his will be the first upgrade when I move to a DDR5 computer.
I plan to desolder most of the old Motherboards and use them for “art” projects and builds. I will probably leave the CPU’s but ewaste/recycle the RAM or sell it if i can.
Old PSU’s generally stay in use unless they are just too anemic to power anything, but its shocking how efficient new generation hardware is and can run off of even 10+ year old 300w PSUs. My cut off is 24pin, if its only 20pin ATX then its ewaste/recycle time.
Seems like the consensus is try to give it away, failing that send it to recycling.
That’s a great suggestion, but I already have my old Z87 Haswell gaming rig earmarked for that. 
What would you scavenge from old motherboards? Like for electronics projects or just “art”?
Maybe both?
Those first gen i7s are still useable with 8GB RAM and a budget SSD, but you’re looking at $80-100 max for a complete setup with k/b, monitor, and mouse. Whether that’s worth the trouble or simply giving it away is up to you.
I try to stick with 2nd gen i5s and newer for gaming, with 4th gen preferred for the better instruction set. You can also swap out anything less than a quad core with a cheap Xeon, but you’ll also need a discrete display adapter.
LGA775-era stuff is probably at the bottom of the bathtub curve right now, so it’s a hard sell even with a core-2-quad to someone specifically looking for retro XP gaming.
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Old or older PC gear does have value. When I used to distribute .exe’s for a myriad of reasons, older platforms (like a 20 year old laptop running Win-2K) were great tests to determine if those .exe’s required an installer or certificates. Most of the time, those .exe’s worked standalone – no .DLLs, runtime libraries or anything else required. Going forward, Intel plans on 64-bit only CPUs. To run older apps on such a new platform, you’d often need an emulator front end. Horses for courses, it’s probably better to run the few critical old apps still needed in the native environment for which they were intended.
Can I interest you in some hardware? Just pay shipping and you can have it. 
You could always throw up a [WTS] listing in the Buy/Sell/Trade sub-forum.
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Untrue. “To further clarify, 32-bit x86 user-space software would continue to work on modern 64-bit operating systems with X86-S.” Although Windows and graphics drivers have changed to the point where some older software works better under Wine these days 
My older hardware has recently been put to use doing some retro Windows 7 gaming (which is funny to call “retro”). It’s amazing what Fermi cards can still accomplish at 1080p 144hz!
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I like shooting it in the field.
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As some have said, try to sell/donate/recycle. A Google search for “E-waste recycling near me” should bring up plenty of results.
Also, as others have suggested, decorate with it! If you’re artistically inclined you could also create an art piece.
Anything to keep it out of a landfill.
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might i suggest
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The article states you’d need virtualization, which in effect is the same… You run a 32 bit environment VM inside of a 64 bit only environment… Those experienced with VM pass-thrus know these often do not work as intended. Just my 2 cents. There was a time where I had to run ancient 8-bit 8080 CP/M code on a PC. An arcane statistical calculation which wasn’t included in modern (at that time) stat routines or packages. Today, I’d just write a program to calculate all those figures of merit or find a R routine which did the same. If you remember, back in the 8-bit days, lots of “copy protected” software often made use of intentional floppy disk errors (small holes drilled in a specific spot the media) to insure you were running stuff off a licensed floppy. You could hack the software to get around that check, but that was often more trouble than it was worth… That said, today that hack would probably be the only way to run such programs using an emulator.
The article states that “those wanting to run legacy 32-bit operating systems would have to rely on virtualization” — not so with user-space software, which is no different in effect than WoW64.
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A lot of simple software won’t run properly just between Win-XP vs Win-7 or Win-10, despite Windows having 32-bit and OS version compatibility. Productivity tools and utilities are often not written with cross platform compatibility in mind – like many games are. And, many of the former remain critical for business processes unlike the latter. Just like old backups, when in doubt keep them around. Never know when you’ll end up needing them.
I’m trying to get modern software to run on my Raspberry Pi Model B that isn’t Raspberry Pi OS.
Turns out nobody cares about armv6hf.
That CPU is very inefficient since it’s 10+ years old so why bother right?