There was a time when the gulf between a new computer and one a decade or more old was so large as to be insurmountable; when a Pentium was the chip to have an older computer had a 16-bit 8086 or 286.
A lightweight Linux distribution can revive old hardware. Puppy Linux and Linux Lite achieve this in very different ways. Both of these distributions can be used for free. Do you have an old computer ...