10 years ago, a non-technical friend gifted me an eMachines tower that no one bought from his uncle's estate sale. I loaded with ubuntu server, racked it up and ran a business off of it, storing some backups, generating 500+ daily customer-requested database reports, and generally kept the CPU busy running batch jobs, builds in docker, etc. I kept it running on a UPS for years until the hard drive errors force the kernel to mount it r/o. I might have kept it going, but I had a replacement on standby.

It's replacement is another cast-off, uses less electricity and is much more capable, despite not qualifying to run windows 11.