Reuse it in your home or office as network storage device/file server to keep shared use files and large files like videos on. It's not that hard to set-up a file server like that.
Install a light (in terms of system resources) linux distribution and use it as work computer for things like word processing, spreadsheets, web design or programming/development.
Use it with Linux as a learning platform to learn more about computer technology, go play around in BASH, learn how to use the command line, learn how to set-up routing, set-up a web server, learn some programming. Have fun and learn skills that can be useful at work and avoid you needing to pay a computer technician in the future.
Strip it down for parts- That DVD-RW drive is still good, so is the power supply, hard drive and PCI cards. Use them in your new PC or keep them as spares. Bring the stripped out carcass to a household hazardous waste depot for environmentally friendly disposal.
Give it someone who is less able to get one themselves, be it a child in the family, an senior who just wants to surf the web and keep busy, or someone living in poverty who your gift might make the difference to learning skills and finding a job, or staying in poverty.
Donate to a project like freegeek, who will refurbish the computer, dispose of any electronic waste in a safe way, and sell the refurbished PC for a low price to enable access to technology for everyone. They'll also 'nuke' your hard drive to destroy any data you had to protect your privacy.
Donate it to a charity store like goodwill, where it will be sold cheaply and where the revenue will do some good for the world.
At the very minimum, bring it a hazardous waste depot, there is a lot of lead and such in a PC and it should not go right into a landfill.
We hope you will consider these options next time you have an 'obsoleted' PC to deal with.
Before you throw out your old PC... by DD-49 network is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 Canada License.
Based on a work at network-computer-info.blogspot.com.
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