It's really easy to give up on an old piece of hardware when that shiny new machine rolls into town. What we shouldn't forget is all the years of valiant service that our machines have been through. Tech Radar has compiled a list of 15 interesting ways to put it out to pasture.

1. Use it as a video recorder

Many modern TV tuner cards, such as the Hauppauge WinTV GO-Plus, only require a 100MHz processor to play live TV, although your chip will need to be capable of around 700MHz if you want to use your old system as a video recorder, too. If it's up to scratch, then you can record shows at DVD quality, plus schedule recordings by using online programme guides. TV tuner cards are supplied with software to play and record live TV in Windows, but you'll probably want to watch shows over a TV rather than a monitor. Microsoft Windows XP Media Center Edition would ordinarily be the best option for this, but you can't buy it on its own and your old PC won't be able to cope with it anyway. Thankfully, there are alternatives. If you want a freebie, try MediaPortal or check out either ShowShifter (£30) or SageTV ($80, around £40) – all designed to work on a TV screen.