Same here except my server is a Supermicro of similar vintage.
"Want" and "require" are not the same.
If someone needs a PC to make money then like other business equipment they can spend accordingly.
Capacitors can often be replaced and board level repair is not beyond small shops and dedicated enthusiasts. I remember the capacitor plague and some motivated enthusiasts recapping their boards. That's not terribly difficult, proof being many enthusiasts and professionals who do board level repairs.
Many vintage PCs including mine work fine. I only demote them to backups when I get bored and feel like a hardware refresh. The retro computing community deliberately run ancient hardware of which millions of computers remain.
For example I've a healthy pile of X and T-series Thinkpads from the 2008 era that function fine despite being assembled from wrecks, and desktops dating to the early oughts.
AI hardware doesn't use conventional RAM modules.
CDs are ancient history and you likely (notes UID) came of age when driving (and license testing) was taken a bit more seriously.
Utility computing can go many years without a hardware refresh, and intensive tasks need not be shared where they degrade performance on a main machine.
Gaming is completely discretionary and parts may be bought at leisure if one already owns a usable machine.
I buy multiple business class PC cheap after liquidations push them onto Ebay. Linux frees me from needing Windows, a few applications excepted which can run in VMs on Linux hosts or on a cheap secondary PC I remote into (KVM switches are also an option).
Owning multiple used PCs (because ever being one-deep on hardware invites downtime) and not discarding working hardware makes life easy. They take up little space hung on walls (my server hangs on a few cents worth of lag hooks) or stacked on shelves or hung from them to leave shelves free for other use.
Home lab enthusiasts solve the business hardware use and space problems with trivial effort making their systems worth a look. They're a friendly supportive community.
Other strategies include not caring about cosmetics where a few scratches or replaceable minor hardware usefully lower prices. Thinkpad enthusiasts were building notebooks from wrecks back when new ones were too expensive. My first A31 was assembled from bartered ewaste along with two old HP servers reused as desktops.
When you have a techy problem, respond techfully! If you really do need a peformant machine to make a living be glad they're still cheap compared to gearing up for vehicle mechanics, serious woodwork, welding professionally etc.
“If you knock out nine total substations among those three grids, you can black out the entire United States.” According to Wellinghoff, which nine substations were taken offline didn’t matter as long as each one was among the 10 most important in its region, and you could black out the three interconnections individually as well: “I mean, it’s not like there are particular substations. You just have to figure out what are the top 10 critical ones in each of those interconnects. Which, to do that, it’s probably something that a bunch of 12-year-olds with the internet could do pretty easily. All you have to do is look at a map of the grid and figure out where most of the wires go into the substations — that’s a critical substation.”
Those days are over.
Being so utterly tech-ignorant in 2026 should be shameful, but the adult choice to be incompetent is completely normalized.
The death of competence was inevitable because the majority of humanity are not intelligent and intelligence is not a choice.
People don't know what right looks like, and PBS is a bastion of old people who should be removed from the levers of power because they're unable to learn.
Failure to ignore that has never not been idiotic.
If your data matters own at least two copies and verify them.
Not hard.
How many weeks are there in a light year?
