> I hear this sort argument a lot. But I never hear of anyone doing it, that is working on a 15 yr old computer for a while. I imagine with Linux it might not be too bad.

The Internet has made this infeasible. Everything has moved online, and 90% of online resources have grown very bloated, though Wikipedia would probably still work well.

Security is another problem. Windows XP would work fine if you can find 15yr old hardware that still functions (hardware rot is a real thing), but the number of 0 days out there is far too high.

All that said, I wonder if any Shoutcast streams still exist. I'm using Youtube Live for the same thing now days (orders of magnitude more CPU being used!).

Coding would work fine, except the old IDEs don't support newer C++ standards, and I'm accustom to my niceties in life, but if you can ignore that, life would be fine for writing code. Modern web platforms wouldn't work that well, writing code would work OK, but the resultant webapps wouldn't run that well.