Old computers and guilt

As the designated technical person of my family I'm usually tasked with sorting out anything computer related. A family member passed away some months ago and I've been asked to sell the various laptops they had acquired over the years.

I think most normal people would just throw them away, but I hate doing that. Most of them are weak in terms of available resources by modern standards, but they still work perfectly fine. One of them is an Advent K4000, with 2GB RAM and a Celeron processor. I don't think most people would have the patience to use something like that nowadays, but it's in immaculate condition - it looks like it was taken out of the box when it was bought (over 10 years ago), looked at, then put straight back. It's thick, heavy and ugly. The keyboard is fairly uncomfortable. It has a faintly adorable feature which I've never seen before: it has a swappable cover for the lid, so you can print something off, cut it to size and insert it into a recess to customise your laptop. It has Windows Vista installed on it, which crawls.

I can't imagine anyone would be willing to buy it, but I guess it's possible that someone may want it for free. The thing that bugs me is that I know how useful it could be. It would be a good little Linux/BSD server: relatively low power, built in "UPS", fairly compact. The resources are more than adequate to run various network services. I booted OpenBSD off a USB stick and found that it supports the wireless card out of the box (Windows Vista doesn't). So I've now ordered a little power meter off eBay so I can measure how much power it would use if I had it running as a little server. I have been thinking about buying a Raspberry Pi, but why bother when I could just use this? Assuming it doesn't cost a fortune to run, that is.

It pains me to think of the number of machines like this that have probably just been chucked in the bin.