This way, personal data (such as bank statements, store receipts, health records, etc.) is protected from prying viruses or hackers, while the newer machine is used to surf the net. As you can see, old computers still serve a purpose either for you or for someone else. And although selling an old computer is always an option, there are a number of things that you can do with an old computer. We described shareware in another article, but because both commercial software and shareware require payment, they're the target of pirates who seek to make these kinds of programs free to use. Depending on their binding legal agreements, licensing typically allows the use of a single program on a single computer. Within Windows, you can set up a home network similar to the way that you set up an Internet connection. Only this time, you'll set up a LAN (Local Area Network) connection. Windows should walk you through setting up a LAN after starting the computer and once complete, you can begin to connect one of your machines to the network. Be safe and scan each and every file you download from the Internet or receive through email regardless of where it came from. 4. Create a barrier between your computer and prying eyes. Anti-virus/anti-spyware programs are only effective after the effect. But you can prevent identity theft from occurring by installing a firewall. Or if you were to uninstall a graphics-editing program, all the pictures you made with the program would become orphan files. The smart thing to do when you don't want to lose the data that you created with an unwanted program is to: 1. Save or convert your documents to a format that will work with different program first (that is, a program that you intend to keep) 2. When you think about upgrading your computer to a new operating system, be careful to make sure that you have the necessary hardware components. We tried to upgrade one of our Windows 98 machines to Windows XP, but we were cautioned that the former may not be hardware compatible with XP technology. Apparently, the Windows XP operating system requires components that weren't developed at the time Windows 98 was distributed and if we were to install Windows XP on this machine anyway, the new operating system would look for hardware that the computer didn't have.