Old ass PC in my house...

Doing some spring cleaning and found a way old Sony Vaio computer in a corner. It ran WindowsXP home edition, to give you an idea of its age (See attached photo). This was a store bought rig I got mainly because it had AV inputs so I could digitize some gameplay back in the days of Red vs Blue. My friends and I tried to make our own version, turns out to be fucking hard and a lot of work, so it never got anywhere.

Anyway, I'm trying to think of something useful to do with this old relic. I'm sure it's virus riddled so I'd have to wipe the hard drive and start over, but any ideas? I'm not real savvy when it comes to older hardware usage.

True Story. I'm still using a Pentium 4 as my main PC.

You might (?) be able to make that into a somewhat-decent retro game emulation machine (for very early generation systems). Could be worth a shot!

@whitegreyblack: There's so many (smaller) low cost, low powered alternatives these days for something like that I would think.

Hmmm... too recent to be all that helpful for classic PC games (although you could still do a lot there, just not as much as with an even older machine). Maybe a tester/learner computer, since you say you don't have a lot of savvy with older hardware? Like, dig deep into it and fiddle around without fear of losing or breaking anything of worth.

Or, of course, import videos from VHS or other compatible analog sources.

@shiftygism: Definitely, but if you have one in your possession and you want a project, there are worse things you can do with an old PC.

If it can turn VHS tapes into digital files and you have some VHS tapes, then do that!

Otherwise, use it as a "learning computer" where it doesn't matter if you break something. Install some lightweight Linux distro and do some programming or something.

If neither of those things appeal to you, find a recycling center that will take it. It's too big and power hungry to be used as an emulation or streaming box when we have Raspberry Pis and there's pretty much nothing else that it's good for.