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Hey lainons, so recently I was told that my school was going to give up their old computers for new ones and were counting on potentially giving away the old computers to students and other people who just wanted some. I currently have a ~2007 era laptop with 1gb of ram and with an old pentium. Anyway, apart from the obvious quality upgrade that it would be, what could I do with a spare pc ? Should I try self-hosting ? Should I try reselling it for profit ? Any idea that could help would be welcomed ! Thanks

Sell it and your other laptop and save up for a recent Windows secured core PC or Chromebook, or preferably, a Google Pixel 6.

Free stuff is always good, what you should do depends of what you want, a second machine would be indeed good if you want to try self-hosting, but it's also nice to have just in case your main-machine breaks.

I use one of those surplus Optiplexes for a home server.

>>60178 >homelab >LAN media stream box >Tor router >I2P router >seedbox

>>60178 >Anyway, apart from the obvious quality upgrade that it would be, what could I do with a spare pc ? Defiantly use it as an upgrade to your laptop. You could use it as your new main computer or have it as a stop gap until you can get a more modern PC. I would keep the laptop as a backup PC.

>>60182 Yes, a pc in which I would use microsoft edge tm and would use bing wallpapers tm >>60183 Yeah that's what I also thought >>60189 Thanks for the ideas mate, due to the other replies what I plan on doing is taking the optiplex and setting it up as my main machine and then using my old laptop to self host my website >>60190 Yes that's a good idea, thanks a lot

>>60178 Nobody is going to pay much for a machine that old. See if you can boot Haiku OS on it. Haiku is getting more stable and useful all the time.

I use Barrier and a small handful of older machines as a kind of desktop extension. Think distributed computing, but more like multilocal computing. Browsing here, compiling stuff there, running VMs over there.

>>60182 Telemetry and spookiness intensifies. Ignore big tech Anyways Google Pixel is not bad because you can install Graphene OS >>60178 >Matrix Server >Searx Instance >idk lol

take as many as you can and then choose what to do with them (resell, homeserver, troll machines, etc). And yes, you as an independent human being are allowed to do whatever you want with a computer and we cannot stop you, so don't ask us what to do.

>>60194 Whoa that's pretty cool, thanks I'll look into it ! >>60203 Yeah, for now I was thinking of self hosting a searx instance with a nextcloud instance too >>60204 Wouldn't that just leave me with a lot of unused computers ? Plus other people might need some too. >>60193 Yeah I'll try booting haiku on my old laptop to see if it works. Thanks everyone for the suggestions !

>>60218 >Wouldn't that just leave me with a lot of unused computers ? not if you sell it to them :)

If they're mini itx try fitting an ARM devboard like Honeycomb LX2 in there. You'd need q cheap GPU also because no onboard HDMI. Otherwise, the Pi 4 is probably better if you're looking for max freedom. Those computers are old, but probably not so old that they don't have the Intel CSME.

>>60218 If you wind up with multiple spare machines, learn 9front. Make separate auth, fs and cpu servers. If it doesn't work or when you've had your fun, you can still use them for whatever and you'll have learned a fair bit.

>>60178 some of those are worth gold. there were plenty of intel 3-4gen era HP workstations (mostly, few are dell though) that fitted platinum power supplies (90% efficiency or 80+ platinum) which are worth more than their cost although those have proprietary pins. you're probably getting them for free so expect it to be pretty good. also refurb pc prices have marked up due to people working from home. look for ones with "high efficiency" marked on the power supply, other than that, make sure to replace the cmos battery and reset the bios configs before upgrading the bios (some 2nd or 3rd gen intel require bios upgrade if you're planning on supporting graphics card made after 2016). it's excellent for self-hosting efficiency wise if you got lucky with the 80+ platinum power supplies (usually supplied with i7 or xeon models). As for what to self-host, that depends on your local laws, some places get into trouble hosting a tor host or doing something piracy related. You're also likely to get in trouble if the users who use your services are all on a watchlist (usually happens with torrent swarms with people who distribute illegal content so be careful with the kind of clients you want on your services).

>>60614 You don't need to replace cmos batteries unless it truly dies. I turned on a dell dimension that had been collecting dust for over 10 years and its clock was off by 10 minutes.

>>60624 some cmos are self-rechargeable lithiums although you should still replace failing ones during bios upgrades since these types of boards are harder to fix and would do something proprietary. a completely drained cmos battery can be dangerous during hibernation or when filesystems and programs expect the time to be correct on resume (although some bios would try to warn during boot), and much worse during bios upgrades where it might expect to remember to do something on next start up (save info in the bios settings). change to a new one during bios upgrades just to be sure.

>>60191 >and then using my old laptop to self host my website Laptop is useful because it's portable. You can set up a home server on a PC and host anything there. Whenever you need to make a more demanding computation just remote-in to the server and work on there from your terminal device, like an under-powered laptop.

>>60178 How old are we talking here? If the CPU is at least 64 bit and has 2 cores, it'd probably be usable on Linux. Just put in an SSD and upgrade the RAM and you'll be golden.