Old laptops and netbooks

Hello lain anons, what do you do with your older tech if you just can't stand to leave it in a drawer? Especially old 32 bit laptops and netbooks? Most blogs suggest the same ideas, but I am looking for more original or alternative uses. I could install debian / void and browse the chans, but apart from that I don't see much use from them. TL;DR: any ideas to repurpose obsolete / outdated hardware?

You could use them to host JS free front-ends, running a non-exit Tor node, running a Monero node, use it as a firewall etc.

I'm gonna throw NetBSD on an old toaster and see if I can host a blog on it.

>>82859 I generally use them for spare parts, but if it's capable enough I'll host something on it. For example, my old ASUS laptop has a decent CPU and GPU so I might reuse it for movie streaming. Could also host some frontends, as >>82860 suggested. But imo that doesn't do much, as all requests are still coming from a single IP (your public one) so hosting multiple frontends at the same time might result in getting IP derezzed or something. If the CPU's are strong enough, maybe try mining Monero? It's very CPU friendly, and you might make some minor cash (I am talking <5 bucks a year)

>>82862 >mining hmm this is interesting but seems highly unlikely since most of them run single core cpus that struggle to run basic web browsing

>>82859 > [W]hat do you do with your older tech if you just can't stand to leave it in a drawer? Especially old 32 bit laptops and netbooks? >>82860 already mentioned most of the ideas I had in mind (Tor relay, Monero mining/nodes, etc.). Even a fairly low powered machine should work fine as a seedbox. Install Debian, get a cheap VPN subscription (if needed) and a fairly high capacity hard drive, and set up qbittorrent-nox (or something similar) with RSS feeds (or set up the *ARR stack). Add Jellyfin for a nice frontend for media management. Docker makes setting up the *ARR stack very easy, and you can set your firewall to block all outgoing connections that do not use your VPN. You can also set up other services. Kavita (or Calibre) for ebooks, Navidrome (or something else) for music, etc. Another idea is a basic backup server. Put two high capacity drives into your machine (or have one connect via USB) and set up a ZFS pool. Then use Syncthing to automatically sync your important files.

You can try to mold them into a soykafty cyberdeck Theyre definetly power efficient enough assuming you use a modern battery.

airgapped computer to protect me from moids

>>82859 For reference I picked up an old Acer netbook, replaced the HDD with an SSD and installed one of those mildly sketchy debloated Windows XP isos onto it. If it doesn't connect to the internet I figure it's fine. I use it for retro Windows XP gaming or development like RPGMaker. I know you can use a virtual machine but it's fun on a tiny machine. Just treat it like a glorified console, basically. >>82866 kek

>>82862 Actual monero miner here, mining Monero is a community thing rather than profit-driven hustla shiet Even with the newest CPUs you don't go over a dollar per day, you can't attach more than 2 CPUs to a motherboard so scaling it is barely worth it and don't forget electricity costs! It'll probably take literal months of 24/7 mining to make more than 5 cents, so if you want to help, you're better off running a Monero node

Copy pasting from hikari3 (https://hikari3.ch/t/res/12.html#12) >Tor Relay >Monero Node >Yggdrasil/DNS42/CRXN node >seedbox (gentoomen library, Do/k/ument, libgen, sci-hub, file.wikileaks.org, Distrubuted Denail of Secrets, anarchist library torrent, Archive.org, ...) >ftp server with ur favorite anime/warez/other files >lightweight game server (CS1.6, HLDM, Quake 1, Quake 3, Openttd, Wesnoth) >XMPP/IRC for friends or local club >Website (your own personal wiki, image gallery, darknet link list (tor.taxi, dark.fail, hidden wiki), review of everyday items (books, gadgets, medication, computer hardware, cars, anime dolls, mp3 players, lighters...), review of extraordinary items (drugs, occult/spiritual things, religious book, linux distros, results of challenges, lists of all kind, irc communities) blog, free speech forum/imageboard, moderated nieche interest forum/imageboard, mirror/archive of existing sites or sites that may chease to exist some time soon, something extraordinary only your website can offer, torrent file index, database with webfrontend)

Build server. Yes, the machines themselves may be fairly low power, but enough of them chained together can be fairly effective. Use this to build software as needed (Android apps, Gentoo packages, etc.) that may otherwise take too long. Speaking of Gentoo, use one as a machine to practice installing Gentoo on. If it breaks, or you break it, no worries. Package repository mirror. You mentioned Void Linux, but the concept works the same across distros. I'm sure there's documentation somewhere on setting up a mirror for your specific distro.

>>82859 I'm hosting a wiki containing details of my projects and details about the parts of the projects. I was initially using pen and paper but the situation got too complex to handle so I decided to host a wiki on my pi 3. I know it's not a netbook but the hardware is on par(even worse in some cases).

>>82870 some more ideas: >pihole >IRC bouncer (different from IRC server as it's a client basically) >managing all your crypto wallets exclusively from this small and portable device >ssh client >"minimalist" non distraction device for writing either markdown or pure plain text, and reading documents >some of these netbooks come with SIM card support, so you can make calls from them and completely eliminate the need of a phone with propietary software/spyware >device for watching videos or studying if you have a pretty small desk >hook it up to some speakers and keep it as a music player >run an online radio >run experimental, obscure, or niche OS in it >DOS machine >hook up a CRT to it and an arcade gamepad and use it as a home arcade with MAME >PC for kiddos (small keyboard = easier to use for their small fingers. but please keep it heavily locked out off the internet if you're gonna do this. use iptables or some other way to restrict the device to a set of webpages, example only wikipedia and a couple webrings or kid's webpages) >put a lot of 720p movies in it and gift it to some older folk as some sort of "portable movie player" >do the Old Computer Challenge in it

>>82881 .. i'm not the same guy as >>82870 , btw flood detected, sanity discarded

A local business is run by my uncle. I was able to get onto the rooftop to mount directional antennas for Reticulum address space to reach my friend's house and also "long haul" to a location a bit outside of our town. The routing is done on a very old netbook with a dual-core Intel Atom. The existing WiFi for the restaurant can also reach the Reticulum address space of our neighborhood. The router provided to the restaurant by the local ISP could also be an outbound internet gateway from Reticulum devices, I guess, but we haven't felt like trying that. One of my friends set up three old 2.5" disks from old laptops mirrored (ZFS) connected with USB 3.0 / SATA adapters on a USB hub connected to some old laptop that had a quad core CPU. I don't remember what the laptop was but it was 10+ years old, and this was three years ago). He had Syncthing running on it and we had two other dedicated (stayed plugged in somewhere) Syncthing for a total of three. We had a lot of our friends on it and using Cryptomator to access the folders. Super comfy.

>>82892 I feel like I need a visual diagram to understand what you just said.

>>82893 I am, in my mind, in 8k resolution, rotating a 3D ray-trace rendered apple with a background of a park behind it, while contemplating that if I did not have breakfast this morning that I would feel hungry.

> Build server. Yes, the machines themselves may be fairly low power, but enough of them chained together can be fairly effective. This is horrible, absolutely horrible, this idea.

You guys talk about weird niche use cases for these netbooks but if I'm being real they're still fine web surfers, mail readers, 720p30 movie watchers and more when paired with a lightweight distro Typing this on my run of the mill Atom Acer netbook that does everything I need it to do, its my main laptop and has been for years. I'll replace it when theres a laptop that is/has: 11.0 inches in diameter or smaller Hot swappable, 73Wh battery Cheap Upgradable ram, replaceable sata hard drive bay Replaceable charging port More than 2 USB A ports Under 15 watt total system power draw There isnt a single laptop out there that meets this criteria so I continue to use my netbook, chromebooks have soldered everything and unupgradable batteries, ultrabooks now are too big, the weird sony vaios are too expensive I may compromise on power draw and get a dual core amd neo variant of my netbook if the single core gets too bogged down with the future internet but for now I see no reason to replace it for my use case

>>82859 >what do you do with your older tech if you just can't stand to leave it in a drawer? Especially old 32 bit laptops and netbooks? Recycle it as e-waste.

>>83786 Super wasteful, at least sell it on ebay or something E-waste recycling is inefficient as fuarrrk

>>83787 I'd rather bin soykaf than deal with ebay.

>>83789 Very american mindset

Would using a laptop or netbook as an NAS make sense? >>83789 Use Facebook marketplace offer it for free or donate it somewhere. Less effort than Ebay.

>>83796 I'm not American. >>83798 I'd rather soykafe in my hands and clap than use Facebook. I don't give a soykaf about old hardware because I'm not poor and can only afford to buy used soykaf, or underage and can only afford to buy used soykaf. If you're still using 32 bit hardware I guess you can add being a retard on top of being underage and/or poor.

>>83809 >look mom, i'm not poor so i'll waste ressources for no good reason kys retard

>>83810 >look mom, my allowance only stretches to hardware that's out of date, so I'll come up with all sorts of excuses about buying old used soykaf to justify myself buying old used soykaf regardless of how bad and how old that used soykaf is.

>>83809 >If you're still using 32 bit hardware I guess you can add being a retard You're either stuck in 2004 or you've set some really low bar for the definition of "not poor" lmao Seriously, 30 dollar laptops are 64 bit. A literal homeless person could afford the bridge to being "not poor"

>>83810 > kys retard it's an alternative to them just throwing it in the trash. Now sit in the corner and think about what you did little boy.

Why would a graffiti wall owner be rich? Why would google be rich? Scammers. That’s alot of scam.

>use it as a NAS server >host a 24/7 online radio >host Telegram (or whatever messaging app you use) bots >set up a Jellyfin or Plex server to stream movies, TV shows >host a printing server (CUPS) so you only need to configure your printer once for the whole network >use it as an offline Bitcoin wallet >set up a pi-hole for the network >use it as a camera DVR >hook it up to speakers and turn it into a music player >use it to test unknown, experimental technologies, like "Wingbits", "Reticulum Network", "LoRa WAN", "Nostr" and such

I would slap retroarch on it and make a super nintendo or something

>>82868 you really don't have to be that much of a schizo when using xp. the myth of "MY HECKIN OUT OF SUPPORT OS IS GONNA BLOW UP!!!!111"" is only perpetuated to fear monger people into upgrading their os (which serves microsoft's interests far more than yours)

>>82859 I have a stockpile of half broken pieces of crap for any projects with potential electrical danger, so nothing important gets fried. Right now I'm building a network switch from nothing, or I'm going to try to. I'll mess something up, and when I do I don't want to fry computers I depend on. So when I start building a prototype, which is just a week or so off, I'll use a laptop to send Ethernet packets for analysis and debugging, then when I'm confident I have a working port, use a bunch of them and stress test it, analyze speed, dropped packets and bugs, etc.

>>82859 I have a few old lappy toppys that I initially planned on deploying in public, but the issue is: firewalls. I can make them connect out of their public wifi LAN with wireguard, so like clients connecting to one of my servers. But I can't connect to them like servers, so it's kinda useless. All the traffic I send to the client gets redirected back to my server because of the wireguard routing entries. Maybe there is a way to ssh into the wireguard clients, switch interfaces, and hop out of the wireguard tunnel?

>>83785 You damn well know we're never getting modular batteries again on laptops. Best you can do with modern hw is a chuwi minibook x, nice one and with an n100

I bought an old laptop recently that I've been planning to switch to because, despite its age (it's a decade old at this point), I like the build quality, the keyboard, the selection of ports and the ease of fixing everything. I've been playing around with it, I upgraded the RAM so it's at 8GB now, but from what I understand the max is 16. I've also put on some new thermal paste. The laptop itself runs fine, however, the power supply started making a faint crackling noise, which I'm unsure about. Is the thing going to catch on fire or is it meant to crackle a tiny bit? It didn't crackle for the first few weeks I had it, but now it does, and I'm afraid to use it in case the power supply blows up or catches fire. What's the diagnosis? This seems like the right thread to ask.

>>83809 My job requires me to catch a lot of flights which means not only do I need a light and small laptop thanks to stingy airlines having a 7kg weight limit for carry ons, I also need a reliable one because my laptop is not a toy and it'll be a PITA for me if it breaks. Most chromebooks are unreliable, unfixable, glowied up junk and there arent many cheap and reliable ultrabooks under 11" afaik, plus no laptop made past 2018 or so has modular batteries which I will NOT budge on, I'd upgrade if I could but there is seriously nothing that suits me better than a netbook, also heaps of netbooks are 64 bit like mine so software support is a non issue For the time being my netbook is totally fine when it comes to using websites, reading/sending emails, managing my finances and watching not pirated movies on boring ass flights. I dont care that it cant play the new call of duty or doesnt get 1600 points in Cinebench like the Alienware Area 58 18.2" GameMaster 5000. I care that its so small that I can palm it like a basketball, it lasts a day and a half on a single charge and can easily be doubled with a spare battery and its reliable I've bought a few 9 cell replacements that work great, when they wear out I'm thinking of getting them recelled with 21700's and get a 130Wh netbook if they fit in the shell. That would be nice, it'd get over 10 hours of constant use per battery since the entire netbook only draws around 9 watts during average use

>>83934 Its an underclocked acer aspire one D255E, they're pretty common and cheap but make sure to get a 9 cell battery, netbooks were held back by battery tech so those 3 cell batteries are pretty bad. I'm pretty sure they're still making new 9 cell batteries so its all good, also make sure to relubricate the hinges

It wasn't mine until it got donated to my workplace about 5 years ago, but I've got an old EeePC from the mid-00s sitting on my bedside table to use as a dream journal. The journal itself is an org-mode doc hosted on my desktop, while the netbook just sshes into it on startup and runs Emacs. Then I just keep it on sleep mode, wake it up after I do, wait maybe 5-10 seconds for it to reconnect to ssh, and record my dream. I'm trying to think of something to do with my old HP laptop from 2014. I replaced it with a T550 back in 2018 and it's been collecting dust since, its SSD being used for the dream journal netbook now.

>>84146 I've checked out the pinebooks before and not only are they impossible to find locally, they just dont fit. Too big and too apple'esque 14 inches is ludicrous for a portable laptop so the PB pro is out, regular pinebook is too cut down and may as well be a plastic MB Air My Acer is still humming along fine, only recently did 1gb ram become too little to comfortably use thx to DEs and the kernel getting fatter and fatter over the years + the modern web, I have lots of time left. If it comes down to it I may even put an SSD in my netbook to speed things up for a quarter of the price of a Pinebook >>84182 Late netbooks have surprisingly great screens to be honest, still often TN so colours arent perfect past a 60 degree angle but text is visible well beyond 70. Probably thanks to screens being the only area OEMs could actually update these things

>>82859 FreeDOS machine? I saw someone on YT doing it, and a portable DOS gaming machine seems cute.

>>85415 Personally, I would discourage Windows 7. The truth was that the hardware inside of most netbooks was way too weak to run 7. The best Windows to run on netbooks is Windows XP.

>>82892 This is actually awesome. Makes me want to setup a cb radio reticulum address for stuff. I'm more enamored by the idea than I actually have a use case for it though. It's be neat to have a lainchan reticulum server that's connected through short wave.

I inherited an old 365XD Thinkpad from a relative (1996, Win98, 16 MB RAM). I'd really love to do something fun with it, but I'm not sure what I even can do with it. The thing can't even run modern "light-weight" Linux distros like Tiny Core or stripped down Gentoo. Maybe I should try to make my own OS for it. OSdev wiki looks like a promising place to start.

>>85618 >can't run TinyCore It absolutely can, if you upgrade the RAM. You will probably need to upgrade the BIOS to the latest version first. The 365XD has onboard RAM and 1 upgrade slot IIRC, you can either put a 64MB or 128MB EDO(?) RAM module in there, either way that will give you over the 46MB TinyCore Linux requires. I would also buy a new battery for it (not as rare as you would think or expensive) and take out the spinning rust hard drive and use an IDE to CF card (use an "Industrial" CF Card ONLY!) adapter. You have 2 PCMCIA slots on that ThiccPad you can put a NIC, or even an old WiFi card in there for network/internet connectivity. If I had it I would 1.) do all the required maintenance (only about a gazillion videos on YouTube about this topic) 2.) run OS/2 Warp 4.52 (last release) or as close as I could get and play with old OS/2 software.

>>85865 Yes but many did not ship with SSDs or maxed out RAM. Upgrades make all the difference.

>>85999 >>85865 Debloated windows 7 with 2gb of DDR3 1333Mhz is still a good bit slower than puppy linux Even with 2gb ram will still be a bottleneck, ik its hard to think but that atom is bottlenecked by its memory as its really not THAT bad of a cpu I cant think of anything puppy linux does technically better than windows other than ram usage, it seemingly makes a big difference though Puppy uses 120mb ram idle on fresh boot, 500 with everything cached like rox and palemoon but everything closed and 100mb of swap Windows 7 final debloated uses around 500mb of ram idle on fresh boot and around 700mb with everything cached and closed with around a gigabyte of pagefile used The conservative governor may also be helping with puppy, it doesnt totally saturate both threads so the system stays responsive while loading a large webpage or installing programs in the background Regular linux distros perform about on the same level/worse than windows 7 depending on how heavy the DE you use is, averaging around 400mb ram usage idle with debian wmaker to 700mb ram usage idle with cinnamon The difference is pretty large, with both OS'es running PM33 with uMatrix puppy is in a different league compared to W7. W7 is noticably slow with animations running at 2fps, switching tabs taking seconds, making tabs taking seconds, choppy scrolling and random hitches. Puppy has smooth animations and honestly feels pretty snappy, switching + making tabs only takes around half a second, animations are smooth unless loading extremely heavy sites like youtube, same with scrolling The performance gap is enough to make the netbook feel fast in everything except loading, webpages actually "warm up" and you can do basic multitasking while retaining that smoothness, it felt like W7 never "warmed up" and was choppy and slow all the time

>>86075 Netbooks by definition were underpowered. They pretty much were based on Atom CPUs, and I'm pretty sure only the last few processors from that line could use more than 2GB of RAM. There were some ARM-based netbooks, but from what I read, they were even worse than Atom soykaf.

>>86142 Atoms get a rough reputation but I like them, yeah they werent ready for a bloated W7 install but are still useful today with a very lightweight linux install A 1.6ghz HT single core with no out of order execution was limiting but the core itself only pulled 2.5 watts, with a 45nm node! Insane efficiency, Pentiums from 7 years before were pulling less than that performance but used 20x more power. 1 year later Atoms came out with a 6W TDP that included an on die memory controller and gp, bypassing the need to use the 180nm power hog i915 chipset Atoms were a power efficiency marvel for their time, too bad they were slammed into 13' laptops that could've afforded far more powerful systems, a practice that would permanently sour the atoms reputation I still think the atom is an neat bit of engineering, imagine if intel dropped a laptop CPU today that costs nearly nothing to produce, used 3-6 watts and was on par with-outperformed 9th gen i5's

>>82859 there are plenty of good ideas in this thread. Here are a few more: >SDR, ADSB (track aircraft locally). Paired up with an rtl-sdr or similar device. >gopher hole or gemini site. These are alternatives to http. >sshchat server for you and friends https://github.com/shazow/ssh-chat

what do you guys think about toughbooks? i got a cf-19 mk2 yesterday (without the hdd or charger, it came too early) and it's nice and small and autistic looking. i'll probably set up something minimal and use it for light browsing and video watching, maybe drawing since it has a touchscreen.

i use my 32 bit netbooks to dual boot templeos and windows xp. i can play cs1.5 on cracked servers from the airport or the innawoods at ANY TIME NEEDED. ya'll have no idea how many noobs can be pwned by showing up at unexpected hours. it'll take a bit of practice to get used to the touchpad but then ya'll will be back to flicking headshots in no time

>>86371 Pretty sure both have broken C states so expect poor battery life, should be identical either way

>>82859 I'd just turn it into a simple emulation box/TV box for the living room if you don't have one already.

>>86220 Toughbooks are amazing ((: I've used three and repaired some of those. Very sturdy and easy to work on, they have a heater for the hard drive so you can use it in below freezing temperatures (which ive done) Dell rugged laptops are good as well! I find them a bit more expensive but with similar goals. Generally higher spec (in terms of computing)

netbooks suck...they can stay in the trash forever

Another thread reminded me these would be good to use to access a remote desktop. All the heavy lifting would be done elsewhere so their performance and limited storage wont be an issue as long as their internet connection is good.

I use mine for running xp and low resource linux distros. I mostly use them to play diablo2 and starcraft lan games with my kids. I'll post a photo someday, but my favorite out of all of them is the Samsung n195

I took the old HHD & used it to store [/spoiler][/spoiler]

>>90461 >not having a random password generator ok where to download one to run locally >not using a password manager ok where to download one to run locally

>>90919 you have one, its called /dev/urandom

>Especially old 32 bit laptops and netbooks? Those things can run DOS shutt natively, unlike gaming Core 2 Duos therefore, you can look up a disc called "MMCD" on archive.org (no copy-worryes! all games on it are shareware or freeware) and rip its contents on your 32-bit Win98/WinXP lappy. You can also toss some cool z0r.de flash animations (z0r.de stuff can also be found on archive.,org) >>83895 Sure! Old lappies can have their batteries rebuilt. If you REALLY want to though

Stil havent found any use for an eePC 701 with 256mb ram that I have lying around for years now. I know about tinycore and I actually have it instaled on there. I also had a void linux installed on an sd card for it but the issue is that I still dont really know what can I do with something that has 900Mhz cpu, almost no disk space, 256mb of DDR2 for goodness sake, tiny screen and an obnoxiously loud fan that doesn't even cool the CPU properly because the thin metal plate that holds the keyboard is the heatsink.

>>90919 There are tons of self-hosted or even offline-supported password managers.

>ok where to download one to run locally Buy a set of dice from a nearby store >ok where to download one to run locally Buy a notebook and a pen while you're at it. Or just use keepassxc

>>93793 Unfortunately, that thing is completely obsolete. Even back then it was very low-powered, so I don't think you can use it to play games on the original OS/hardware. If you write software, you can use it as a hardware target. If your program runs with decent performances on it, it will run fast on anything.

>>93793 I used one of those as a portable media player back then with an external HDD. It worked fine with MPEG-4 Part 2 encoded files. It would be very subpar nowadays, but it's a use.

>>93793 At one point I wondered if I could replace the board with some pi-zero soykaf and put some batteries in the emtpy space, but then I thought that the internal LCD probably doesn't know what HDMI is and the cost/time investment of making a custom LCD and then route all the pereferals to the corresponding holes in the case will be higher than finding some free pi laptop case design and ordering a 3D print