In all my years of servicing computer, I have always seen old computers become re-purposed or re-sold for other uses. I don't know where you come from, but Dell and Hewlett-Packard are good examples of how old machines get re-used for education, customers, servers, or even donated to charities.DaedalusYoung wrote: Sure, but that's not how the average customer uses their computer. If they get a new one, they get a whole new machine and throw out the old one.
Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise has 4 virtual machine licenses to run in Hyper-V. A system administrator can easily make a bit-for-bit copy of an old server and run it in Hyper-V. Proprietary software or drivers are easy reasons to do so. You don't erase a hard drive to put an old copy of Windows on it. That's just silly. There are reasons why professionals who specialize in software like VMware make $50,000 a year or more.DaedalusYoung wrote: If they want to keep their old XP machine, they will keep it; they won't buy a new computer, erase the harddrive and install an ancient version of Windows.
I'm talking about corporate America. An average user isn't going to spend $20,000 on a server that has a terrabyte of RAM or for Windows Server 2008 Datacenter nor Enterprise for that matter. I also have plenty of friends who do use virtual machines. That doesn't invalidate your argument, but neither does it mine.DaedalusYoung wrote: They will never use a machine to run a virtual machine or install Linux on it, as long as it comes with MS Office, they're happy.
And Libre Office comes with Ubuntu Linux and Red Hat Fedora. It's a nice replacement for Microsoft Office. It's free just like Linux, and I can export a document to natively run in Microsoft Office as well. PDF documents are the best way to go sometimes, but the DOCX file format works as well.
Since we have different personal experiences in this argument, how about we agree to disagree?