Maintaining Computers Donated to Schools and Charities?

ScottBob asks: "Recently, there was a story on the local news about a community outreach center that was broken into and vandalized, and among other things, several donated computers were stolen. After the story aired, several more computers were donated by local businesses. A followup story showed the sympathetic business owners removing unused computers from closets, etc. to donate to the center. This leads me to believe that the computers the center originally had were also old computers that were donated because they were taking up space and gathering dust after being replaced with newer, updated computers. But that's where the problem lies: Since they are usually given away due to obsolescence, how is the community outreach center, elementary school, or other charity supposed to maintain them? They won't run today's software, which usually means having to track down legacy software of its era, possibly making illegal copies whenever legitimate copies are too scarce, making the school or charity guilty of crime under current laws." Scott makes an interesting point, however I'm not so sure that much can be done about this situation. Computer hardware and software becomes obsolete so quickly in this market (and it's happening faster by the day, too). Couple that fact with the latest trends in software laws and licensing and you discover that keeping an old machine viable is getting more difficult by the day, and this will get worse as time goes on.

"As we all know, sooner or later older computers reach a point where they are useless for anything beyond the software of its era. I recently was called to help a fix a friend's granddaughter's computer. The problem? The computer worked perfectly, everything was fine. But it was OLD. A 1995 vintage Packard Bell with Pentium I, 75 MHz processor, 4x CD player, 6 MB RAM and 500 MB hard drive, bought right after they started shipping with Win 95 preinstalled, and cost them nearly $2000 when it was new. Obviously, they weren't too up to speed on computers, because they wanted to get on the internet, and tried to install AOL 6.0. Of course, the installer came up saying that the system didn't meet the requirements. That's when they called me. I spent the next hour trying to explain that it would be easier to buy a newer computer than to try to upgrade this one. This is exactly the type of computer that gets passed along to charity, one that still works but is just too old to keep up with today's MP3 playing, DVD viewing, CD burning, cable modem screaming, 3D graphics slinging supercomputers we all now have sitting on our desks.

Assuming this computer could be upgraded to the maximum allowed by its motherboard (maybe 32 MB RAM and 800 MB HD if the BIOS supports it, and Pentium 133 if it can be jumpered that fast), are there sites that deal exclusively with the care, feeding and uses of geriatric computers, like where to obtain parts, how to jumper old motherboards and just how much upgrading can be done without having to replace the motherboard (thus having to buy a video card, sound card, and modem, since they were often built into the mobo of these old systems- in short, an entirely new computer), and links to suppliers of legacy software (' abandonware') that can be accessed by a REALLY light web browser such as Opera?"