There are a lot of good sellers of corporate leasebacks out there… A five year old ThinkPad is going to kick butt over anything new with a Celeron. I’m a student, and I got an MSI workstation with an i7-9750H, 16GB RAM, 256GB NVME, and a garbage battery for 250$ CAD. That’s less than 200$ USD.
I know this isn’t a real answer, but it’s what I use as a stop gap measure… I basically have a text file called buffer, and ssh into the VM on a terminal on my host, and paste into the buffer file.
I know it’s lame, but for simple text and stuff, it works. For things like files and pics, I use a shared drive.
If someone has a better answer… Please let me know!
I got an HP DL380 with 16 drive bays, and I basically just dump any old hard drives in it whenever I upgrade. I have 24TB in it, had it for years, and I’ve only ever lost one drive at a time, and I just shrink out the dead drive, and then toss another one in if I get a new one. “I’ll move your files to your new computer if I can keep the old one…” I even 3d-printed a couple of 2.5"-3.5" adapters to stuff old laptop drives in there. Caddies? Uhh… I think it was 120$ from the local electronics recycler. It’s old, it’s slow, it’s basically a giant samba share.