I use a 2008 Dell Inspiron laptop as an office PC. I upgraded the CPU, which would be absurd for a new notebook. I also upgraded to 4 GB DDR2, and an SSD. It still works great!
I think it’s always best to keep things maintained and continue using them instead of buying new things. Maybe some of us have a bunch of old stuff laying around. But what stuff are you still using?
I don’t know how actively this is since I only use it to replay my old childhood games in Win XP but here it is:
AMD Sempron 2400+ 2x1 GB DDR1 (upgraded from 256 MB) 80 Gb IDE HDD integrated graphics