retiring older slower MoBo's and CPU's ?

friend of mine has an old packard bell multimedia 730 with a Cyrix 266 CPU with two small square fans on the heatsinks, the CPU is very small,
the system was originally designed for 98- and we dont have 98 disc that wil work for it, it does not have later style upgradeable larger motherboard but it does have normal modern ram card slots and such,

is there anything to save from this puter or just toss in a dumpster and run away fast?

i have a celeron 300 mobo and cpu and heatsink that was all original in this compaq tower i am using right now, that combo ran fine too but of course its not much- if any- better than the pentium 266 of my friend's that i am looking at for him right now

what do you do with systems from 98 99 changeover years like this made by gateway and pack bell and compaq and such ?

am i doing anything wrong by handing his puter back to him and telling him its too old to do anything with nowadays and to find something newer instead ?


im sure that is what to do ?

i mean who would ever try to run an old 266 or 300mhz system nowadays ?

thats dinosaur, its small, tiny, slow,
couldnt imagine what ther eused to be in the years before, but i remember a little, yeah in junior high our puter class was made of systems that had no windows and just had old DOS, and big 3.5" black thin floppies, real floppies, this was in like uhh 1989 1990, also i have an old tape drive around in good shape with 98 tapes and all, and some other oddball old puter stuff, but im gonna be cleaning out and tossing it all soon, no museum will want them or anything, so they are worthless, to keep or anything, technology outdated and useless in this day and time now,


even my 650 athlon slot A is dinosaur now, but im keeping it, it works great for me, plus i have backup mobo and some parts just for no reason, maybe in case i can ever get some more towers and HDD's and ram cards and assemble a couple basic systems- just like what i am running right now- for fun




thanks for anything

 

shure there is something you can do with that old pos. one option is make a low budget router. all you really need for that is a cpu, very little ram, and either a small hd, cdrom or floppy. theres plenty of linux distros out there to pick from that are free to download. and you have yourself a router for $0. you could also make keychains ect...

 

I managed to put whole mini Linux with router options on a floppy disk, and there was even enough space for SETI@home client.
There were two network cards, one for the broadband modem, other for outgoing connection (to ethernet switch).
And it worked surprisingly well on a Pentium 233MMX.