If the goal is to reuse free equipment, sure. If the goal is to become familar with Cisco products sure. If the goal is an inexpensive network, NO.
As pointed out, its all old gear. Even used, its on par or more expensive than a lot of basic managed switches and router gear that's on the market right now from SOHO vendors like DLink, TP-Link and Trendnet.
Looking at just the 2970 as an example, looking at gently used copies, they are in the $200 range. That's more expensive than, for example, a TP-Link SG-2424 24-port Gigabit switch with roughly comparable features.
Also for cost of ownership, that SG-2424 is listed as a maximum power consumption of something around 25w and ACTUAL power consumption should be around 15w with all ports link active (based on my experience with the 16 port model). That Cisco 2970 is 160 or 190W maximum power consumption, depending on the SFP or non SFP version. I am sure its lower than that in real world use...but I bet its still at least 3-5 times higher power consumption that that TP-Link switch.
That means, cost of ownership, that Cisco switch might be guzzling anything from $20-30 per year up to $100 per year (or more) in extra electricity, depending on the exact real figures on power consumption (I can't find them searching).
I'd assume that the Cisco router is the same way.
So...just in a year or two's time, you could pay for new equipment, even if this is gifted/free equipment. For stuff that runs 24/7 you really, really, really want to pay attention to things like power consumption.
Want a new router with great configurability, try the Ubiquity Edge Lite. Its supposed to be great, good support, pretty inexpensive and low power consumption. It can easily double as a firewall.
For the switch(s), go with something newer and semi-managed/managed.
My TP-Link SG-2216 is decently powerful (check the review here on smallnetbuilder), very cheap (I got mine for $100 on sale, regularly goes for $139) and good warranty (5 year). I have a just bought a Trendnet TEG-160ws 16-port switch to expand my network as I ran out of ports on my SG-2216 use, about 2 years old for $60 shipped. Not quite as good as the SG-2216, but decent and dirt cheap.
It uses about 8w with just a few ports occupied. Decent management options.
Honestly, even if this stuff is free and you just want to learn Cisco stuff, setup a seperate network to test and play with and then turn it off at the end of the day, using something else as your actual core.
You do not want to be using 8+ year old networking equipment for a lot of reasons, primary being because it is an energy hog and will cost you significant money to keep it up and running. Some of it is also a reliability/feature issue. What Cisco offered 8+ years ago on an access switch is pretty standard fair on most semi-managed/managed SOHO access switches these days, and/or BETTER features on the newer gear.
If we leave IDS/IPS/FW out of the equation, how's everything else?
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