I guess for me it is like those backyard mechanics that pick up some old bomb of a car and rebuild the thing. Naturally I dump what ever OS I find on these things and install Linux. You can get far more use out of the old machines that way. You can even make very old hardware usable with some distros specifically built for such uses.
BTW, did you see some one is starting up a Blender blog / channel here on Steemit?
Yep it's one of the TA guys, @angusg. He's pretty cool :D
If you're picking up second hand machines like that it's probably much safer to do that than try to salvage whatever's on there :O