Bring me your hand-me-downs

Just before Christmas, I changed my PC for a newer model. Nothing unusual in that, in these days of Moore's Law and almost instant obsolescence. Except that I swapped my 8MHz 286 for a 25MHz 386 courtesy of my brother, who had just bought himself the latest Pentium monster and given me his cast-off machine.

My penchant for out-of-date technology is a tad unusual for an IT journalist.

In fact, the Daily Telegraph was so tickled by the idea that it photographed me last November hugging my old 286 and captioned it: Why I love my ancient computer.

Many of you will no doubt be surprised to learn that the lucid prose you read every fortnight is cranked out on the technological equivalent of a Morris Minor. After all, you couldn't tell, could you? My text isn't littered with anachronisms, you don't have to read it in chunky letters on a little green screen and I don't have to use short words because long ones take too long to spell check.

In short, my ancient PC is more than adequate for me to do my job. Less ancient PCs - say, 486s and early Pentiums - are adequate for doing even more jobs, which is why a number of companies donate their cast-off equipment to charities, schools, community projects and the like.

Unfortunately, not many of the donors are IT companies. This is odd because you'd think they'd appreciate better than most the benefits of computers to cash-strapped voluntary groups.

I suppose they might be like the cobbler's children, limping along with outdated machines even as they bank the cash from their latest all-singing, all-dancing sale. Or perhaps they're like car dealers, where the mechanics buy up the old bangers for a song and do them up for profit. Or maybe all the managers have interesting rockeries in their gardens.

Perhaps they are worried that their obscene profit margins or degrading personal habits will be revealed by the contents of the hard disks, which they needn't be since reputable recycling organisations always wipe them.

Or maybe the worry is that they will be liable if the machine throws a wobbly or electrocutes a small child, which shouldn't happen if they transfer ownership properly.

But I suspect it's simply that the PC business has swallowed its own marketing message and really believes that any product which is more than six months old is of no use to man or beast. Which, as any school or charity - not to mention this particular freelance writer - will tell you, is absolute nonsense.

The recyclers say PC quality is now so high that 80 per cent of old 486s can be re-used. And that's how the likes of Bytes Twice, the trade association for charity recyclers, can benefit, if companies decided to do the charitable thing and donate their old machines.

The alternative, of course, is to give all your cast-off Pentiums to me.