hedwards: I don't want to waste my time going into a thread that's dead because some wiseacre thought it was cool to post some trivial tripe at the end and drag people into {a} post.
This is your main problem, not the age of the thread.
When asked about necroposting, I do refer to the threads as conversations in a bar. You hang with your friends, talk about relationships, movies, games and other stuff. If someone wishes to revive a topic you talked about in the start of the evening with "Yeah, that car is really nice", you would laugh at him, but if his comment was "You know, the problem with your car's engine may be in the gas filter" you would gladly return to the topic.
So it's not the threads, it's the posters. Locking the threads wouldn't help, we would just have more threads about the same thing, and you wouldn't be able to find the information you recall seeing in one of them.
A "The last post in this thread was over a month ago, are you sure you wish to revive the discussion?" could work, assuming people would read it.