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What's the best way to make use of an old laptop? (hexbear.net)

submitted 4 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

26 comments fedilink hide all child comments

My aunt's got an old slightly broken laptop. She's got a new one. No one has any need for this old one anymore. It has no selling value. Etc etc etc.

I know I can put an SSD in it and run it on Linux to make it run smoothly as a laptop for emails and word processing etc, but I already have a crap old laptop for exactly that.

What sort of fun things can you do with an old laptop? I'm talking like, using it as a whole new device. Maybe using it as a 'TV Box' of sorts - getting some radio apps, and hacked streaming apps... Or loading up a bunch of PS2 games on it... or having it as the jankiest personal assistant, with timers, and calendars, and all that.

You know what I mean.

I love pointless gadgetry.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Depending on the laptop, you can configure the charge controller to properly cycle the battery so it can function as a UPS. https://linrunner.de/tlp/faq/battery.html

Good call to be careful about it though, because you definitely should make sure its configured correctly if you're going to leave the battery in.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago

Even properly cycling it which I did for a bit using tlp i wouldn't trust. I've had too many devices go spicy pillow on me i just assume every lithium ion battery will inevitably end up exploding and take precautions. This especially so for an old laptop with an already degraded battery.

Daily scheduled data backups and just letting the server go offline for me are safer especially considering my server doesn't actually run anything critical that i can't just reprovision if it does corrupt itself since i have scripts that recreate it all from scratch.