They're gather dust in storage rooms and taking up extra space in your garage or workplace. They can't handle today's request, peripherals or operating systems. Yes, older computers are a irritation, like the brother-in-law who sleeps on your sofa for a few months.

But throw tech gear into the garbage is not accurately environmentally exact. Better ideas: Recycle older computers or retrofit them to serve up a new purpose.

Fortunately, older PCs and their kin are more than capable of handling a bunch of new uses; you can turn them into anything from gaming rigs to media stations where everybody in your family can rip CDs and fill up their MP3 players.

Now my top 10 choices for what to do with a PC that's history its climax as a main computing device but still has abundance of existence in it for extra uses. I've tried all of these, and I let you know how well these projects have worked for me.