What's the coolest way to repurpose an old laptop? I'd love to put the excess computing power to use somehow, or start building connected home/IoT stuff, but I'm mainly just interested in hearing what others have done...
Look into recycling it to somebody who could use a computer. Maybe it is someone down on their luck or struggling to survive and can't find a way forward or an elderly person or just a kid who could do with their own computer.<p>Slap Ubuntu on it and pay it forward. If you gift it to somebody looking to use it for more than Facebook then stick some free ebooks for Python or such on it.<p>It is easy to think "but <i>everyone</i> has access to a computer" and while that is mostly true having your <i>own</i> computer is very different from access to one.<p>My father is a teacher and has recycled three laptops (and a desktop a long time ago) to kids living on the poverty line. I know at least one was very grateful as I got a lovely thank you letter from them.
First Option: Donate it (as @cbanek and other have suggested)<p>Second Option: Put it on the wall near your door, and have it as a generic assistant. Put the days weather, your family calendar, time until next bus/train, news headlines, etc. on it. They should change at different periods of the day to give you time relevant information (e.g. I want to know the time until the next bus in the morning, but I don't care about this when I'm home in the evening).<p>Advanced: Have the webcam in the laptop detect when someone comes home using OpenCV or similar. Then, have that information accessible via an app (read: HTML5 webpage). That way, you should know when your kids come home in the afternoon and they forget to text you "I'm home safe". Or you can have it run a script when you come home like reading the latest news stories, reading emails, etc.<p>The combination of microphone, web camera, battery and screen in this make it perfect for this. Your other options are to use a tablet. You could also link to the Google/Microsoft voice recognition software to listen to your commands (e.g. add Milk to the shopping list).
If it isn't too old, there are some charities in the US that take laptops and give them to veterans. Goodwill is also a good place.<p>Other ideas might be to purpose it for your car, or somewhere else, but that depends on how old / large / power hungry it is.
Is there a recommended place where geeks in need can apply for donated laptops?<p>I took a year off with my wife in kids in the cheapest US locale I could find (agricultural area of Puerto Rico) so I could survive on my passive income projects while I learn some new skills (C++, Go, deep learning, and a few others)<p>I didn't expect to lose both laptops I brought - One to power surges caused by bad infrastructure and one to tiny sugar ants that decided to build a colony inside the laptop.<p>I've ended my sabbatical and am heading back to the mainland, but it's hard to do dev work on the laptop I managed to breath life back into when I know that if it dies, I have no way to replace it.<p>I'm sure I'm not the only poor geek out there. Where should we look for cast-off equipment that doesn't get mined by opportunists who just want free stuff to sell on ebay?
Something that doesn't come up very often: if you find an entrepreneur from Africa/Middle East/Southeast Asia/LatAm they're often very interested in purchasing second hand MacBooks or whatnot to power some new ideas :-) Ebay isn't great because there are steep customs charges which you don't necessarily have if you're selling privately.
The machine was future e-waste since it was produced. That is a sunken environmental cost and shouldn't figure into the equation of whether it is useful to prolong its life. There is a running environmental impact related to power usage. This is the one that you need to offset with gained utility.
But perhaps the most important decision: at this point you are in control of the end-of-life handling. You can opt for the most responsible process. Once you donate or sell the machine, you have no control, and the further down it goes the more chance it will end up in an illegal landfill, or in a Chinese toxic child-labour scavenging yard.
Do we really need 20+ comments calling for OP to give it to charity? It's noble, but it's pretty clear OP wants to start a project with it.<p>Honestly, if you're a hacker, you're probably not going to want to part with working hardware you might use later. I own a ton of parts and old computers for this purpose.<p>So, if you're looking to use your old laptop for something novel, I suggest:<p>1. Turn it into a TERM server.<p>2. Turn it into a media center with KODI(XMBC).<p>3. Turn it into a game server.<p>4. Put Windows Server onto it and build a home domain.<p>5. Install a different OS than your main laptop and use it interchangeably.<p>6. Use it for projects that may put your main laptop into danger (water, high voltage, etc.).<p>7. Plug a Kinect into it and turn it into a machine vision robot.<p>8. Add it to a BlenderGrid with all of your other computers and teach yourself 3D animation.<p>9. Install it into your car as a carputer / wardriving rig.<p>10. If it has a GPU, use it as a Steambox for low-end gaming. (See also: Media Center)
If it has an HDMI port, you can install Kodi[1] on it and plug it to your TV to create a really cool media center.<p>[1] <a href="https://kodi.tv/" rel="nofollow">https://kodi.tv/</a>
Thinkpad X60 manufactured December 2006. Runs any recent Linux well and could be used for daily tasks including Libreoffice and Web, so I support donation to one who needs basics.
Can also run a customised ChromeOS install from<p><a href="http://www.neverware.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.neverware.com/</a><p>which allows use as Web terminal and music player with local storage.
I've got a 1998 Fujitsu laptop that is on 24/7, displaying a digital watch on an old 17" LCD monitor. It's so old it doesn't even have a fan, so it's completely silent(I've also replaced the hdd with a CF->IDE adapter with a 1GB CF card), and it runs Windows 95. I think it's a Pentium MMX 166Mhz + 64MB of ram. I guess nowadays a raspberry pi could do the same job with a slightly lower power consumption, but I've been using that laptop this way for years, so I feel bad about retiring it now.
Run ArchiveTeam Warrior -- <a href="http://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=ArchiveTeam_Warrior" rel="nofollow">http://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=ArchiveTeam_Warri...</a> to help the Internet Archive create archival copies of websites and services that are being decommissioned.<p>Also BOINC from UC Berkeley -- <a href="http://boinc.berkeley.edu/" rel="nofollow">http://boinc.berkeley.edu/</a> -- to volunteer your processor cycles to scientific research. E.g. the current OpenZika project:<p><a href="https://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/research/zika/overview.do" rel="nofollow">https://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/research/zika/overview.do</a>
If you're willing to part with it you should consider giving it to someone that doesn't have a computer. Otherwise, just save the computer and run another operating system on it for testing or hold on to it until you find a need for it in your life.
How about recycling it? We won't need another wind turbine if people stop looking for excuses to keep old and less power efficient devices up & running.
Run pfSense on it as your router, using VLANs to make use of the single NIC on it.<p>I've done this myself, and it was a great learning tool.<p>You get the benefit of having a built-in UPS too. Note that you'll need a switch capable of supporting VLANs too, but you can pick these up very cheaply nowadays.
I've just started doing this, but here's all I'd like to do. Setup a Twilio service number that hits your old laptop. Write scripts for things you want automated in and around the house. Two I'm working on - buy gifts for people based on their Amazon wish list & download movies based on rotten tomatoes ratings.<p>When I'm finished, I should be able to text my PA number: "gift John" and a script runs on my old laptop that buys and sends a gift to John.<p>Admittedly, this is a somewhat contrived use case, but I like automation and repurposing old hardware :D
I have an old laptop (seems to be from the mid-00s) donated from a friend that I installed Arch Linux on and have constantly on and plugged into my network. It runs an ssh server and I can log into it anywhere remotely. It comes in handy for running scripts, downloading torrents/files when I'm out or I run cronjobs to do certain things at certain times.
Donation is probably the best way to use it.<p>I had an old laptop I used to run Linux + Spotify on, so that I could take it to people's house parties and run music off it. No concerns about drink spillages or it being stolen, and you can let anyone add songs to the playlist. Warning: be selective over who you let near it! :-).
Aside from giving it away or using it as a cheap 'server' for ssh or whatever, there are a few other fun options. Mount it behind a picture frame or do what I did and pop it in a briefcase as a picture frame. <a href="https://cdn.hackaday.io/images/resize/600x600/6180151395319767958.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://cdn.hackaday.io/images/resize/600x600/61801513953197...</a> This is a fun project but you'll quickly get bored with it using up a plug socket :P
Another option: I don't know your background or anything, but I see a lot of people with a dedicated laptop running a printer, laser cutter or whatever - saves tying up your primary machine during print jobs.
My main machine is actually a x200s. It's a perfectly fine machine for my daily needs, free software development, browsing the web, etc. If it is a machine like that I'd suggest to keep using it and treating it just like any other machine. You could even get rid of the hardware backdoor (ME+AMT) by replacing the BIOS with libreboot and use it as a slightly more secure machine for crypto.<p>If it's considerably older than that it might still be sufficient for software development, so you could either sell it, or have a refurbisher sell it, or donate it to projects like a local CoderDojo group.
Wow. These are all great responses. It's funny...I've installed Ubuntu, messed with Kodi and Plex, and run a personal website on it, but at the end of the day, I think I might just actually donate it.
I've turned an HP 2000 laptop with an Intel CORE i3 and a smashed screen into a hub for some old scrypt miners, as well as just a general purpose terminal in my 'noc'. If I had another one I would probably use it to learn more about, and set up, a honeypot on my home network.<p>Does it have a good GPU? Have it run password hashes for Aircrack-ng instead. Are you versed in Linux distros? If not, use it to play with unfamiliar OS (driver issues notwithstanding) without too much worry about breaking anything important.<p>#tldnr use it to learn something new
I always have the same idea when I replace my old machines, but eventually I just recycle them or give them away.<p>Usually the hardware I'm replacing it is so much faster that using the old machine as a compile farm or something like that doesn't make sense.<p>Using it in a robot or something sounds fun, but I'm more likely to use a Rasberry Pi or Arduino for that.<p>Could use it to play with distributed computing, but even that might be easier using a couple VMs on your new machine.
As many others say, give it away. Many don't have access to computers, and $100 or less is still a lot of money. Seriously can transform someone's life.
Another idea is to be able to run dashboards in the office from these laptops. We have a couple of laptops doing this in the office. We hid the laptops away somewhere so it doesn't look awkward, then route a VGA or HDMI cable to 27 inch screens that are mounted on the wall. We had a pretty complicated dashboard, one that the Raspberry Pi (at the time we set this up) struggled to display.
I'm using a 2009-era laptop as a server (ssh, http, irc-bouncer). Having tested the power consumption, (with the screen off), it sits at 6.5 W in idle, according to powertop, so it's very convenient. (I'm quite surprised by this figure, as I doubt modern Core M cpus can be much better than that). It's a P8400 cpu.
LibertyBSD, learn to use bundled FVWM2 , install SPlayer - Seamonkey - Rox.<p>Set up ~/.fvwm2rc. Copy it and hack it a lot. Enjoy an ultrafast machine.<p>Run SMPlayer, search for the option "Skip loop filter", enable it for HD videos.<p>Get Audacious, you'd need some background music to relax yourself.<p>Learn to code in Scheme, and get some books on AI .
An old laptop is probably best used as a terminal, provided it has decent keyboard and screen. I put my ThinkPad 720C (best laptop keyboard ever, but 4MB RAM) to good use as a Linux terminal using VNC back in 1999... It'd probably be still useful in that role today for what I typically do.
I repurposed my old laptop for my writing so I'd encourage you to do the same. Since I'm currently in the process of writing a book I thought it would be the most logical action to take. The laptop is running debian and the text editor of my choice (for the drafting) is Sublime Text.
I recently turned a 6 year old 11" MBA into my coding laptop for coffeeshops on the weekend. Smaller screen helps me focus and it's good use. Took it to the apple store for a new battery but the sad part is how far technology has come.
If it's one of those small ones (thinkpad x60 and x2xx generation), use it as a robot controller. Put it on top of an iRobot Create and experiment with robotics.
Not especially cool but I use my old one mostly for uploading video to youtube which can take many hours (slow broadband) while I'm using the new one in cafes.
home-assistant.io is a pretty fun little hobby. I run it on the same core2 duo laptop I use as my media server. Old laptops work great as home servers.
Keep it in a drawer. In 10 years time having hardware that you truly own that doesn't spy on you, and open backdoors will seem novel and may be worth a lot of money as a result!
Laptops make great low-power 'servers' for soho needs, all in a slim form factor. Obviously won't do if you need grunt, but for light work they're great. They even come with their own Uninterruptible Power Supply and local console!
Format and clean it entirely, then install the least resources consuming Linux OS you can find (something like PuppyLinux is great, even though CentOS was good for me, too).
Now, you can use it as an extra screen. If it has an HDMI socket you're in luck. If no, just get a HDMI to VGA adapter and you're set.