It's not a dollar/year. It's like megawatthours and so on. One dollar year is paying one dollar per year. 12.5 dollaryears is 12.5 dollars for a year. Easy.

That's because the colour temperature of everything from books to walls works well under the "warm" light.

Maybe, but I would hazard a guess that where this old tech is being used at all is likely to be in a resource poor environment. The person supporting the network might not even be on the same continent. It's highly unlikely this is being used in a cheap-ass company who just don't want to upgrade a machine.

The fact that the author didn't use and OpenGL equipped graphics card also massively undermines its credibility to the point of the article being a complete waste of time. Using on-board "vga compatible" graphics (I haven't heard that phrase since 1998) is a joke, he might as well have used a 486 and a 500mb hard drive and complained that the machine wouldn't even boot.

So which mainstream OS has a better security record then?

I think you'll find pacemakers use lithium batteries.