There's always what I call "giving a friend a sideways upgrade".
If you have a friend with a less-capable computer, that uses the same type of drives, pull their Hard Drive(s), put them into your old computer, and once you get it operational, give it to them as a gift. That way, they retain all their old information, on a better machine (though if their machine was one of those annoying out-of-the-box ones that does a software/hardware comparison check, you'll have to disable the check).
Then, spend $20-30 online, and buy an external HDD converter enclosure, and turn the old internal drive into an external drive to use for transferring files and storing backups between the desktop and laptop.
Or, if you know multiple people needing better machines, part it out to help them all (or, do a serial upgrade, where your machine replaces most of one person's machine, then you use the removed parts to upgrade someone else's machine, and so on). I've had one of my machines end up upgrading 3 different computers for friends, plus the HDD becoming an external (at least, until one of those 3 people gave me an even larger drive for the enclosure, that was from a DOA motherboard machine someone gave them).