>>Sooner or later, all of our machines will go the way of that 286 that one of our customers wanted to give to the local school. I had to find an old 5.25" floppy (probably 8 years old) to find the setup.com - as then the setup was often loadable, not in the CMOs - so the machine would be able to boot... into DOS 5.0.
>
>I don't have anything lower than a P200 that still is in service. The laptop is an Athlon K6 333Mhz, but I've upgraded it several times from 64MB to 128MB to it's max 256MB ram, and I bumped the harddrive from 4GB to 10GB. It's still quite usable, but the LCD is now starting to fade. The battery long ago gave up the ghost so it's not very mobile anymore as it must be plugged in at all times. Not too shabby since it's been in use since '97.

My point was that old machines are still operable - under the then operating systems. You wouldn't try to load XP on that box, would you?

And, BTW, about "gave up the ghost" - I've once found this piece of wisdom on the web:

"All electronics operate on magic smoke. Proof? When you see the magic smoke go out of your chip, you know it will never work again."