Why would using older hardware be limiting yourself any more than you just described? It just happens to do it by it's nature of being old instead of you deliberately limiting modern equipment.
As long as it works, why not use the hardware if you have it and it's still operational? Older desktop PC's have a certain power usage issue compared to modern ones, but laptops usually tend to keep power consumption down.
I run photoshop, after effects, premiere. Those tools are absolutely not going to run on older hardware. Anything media related would just a joke. Even tools like FFMPEG, ImageMagick would run like a turtle processing the media I'm processing on a daily basis. Just because I'm coding something doesn't mean that code isn't doing some heavy lifting that older hardware would be suffice.
If you need to do some heavy work then an older system obviously won't do. Editing files with Vim, on the other hand, works just fine with something like a Core 2 or Pentium M.
Everyone's use case is different, but in many cases, older hardware simply isn't a limitation.
Absolutely, I just used Deadline for writing and light diagramming. As a bonus I actually liked Win2k, it was stable and didn't get in my way. The only thing it was missing was font smoothing.
