Old laptops also make for great servers and hobby computers. If you don’t need the form factor of a pi or mini pc, throw Debian or whatever on an old laptop and play away! I’ve got jellyfin, my DNS, reverse proxy and an octoprint server running on mine. It’s the little heart of our network.
IMO, one of the biggest risks of using a laptop as a server or some type of utility system is that you may not look at it regularly enough to see if the battery has a problem.
Go look at your hardware folks. Just stare at it for a few minutes every few months or more frequently. See if anything looks strange or different about it.
A heads-up to anyone running old laptops; buy genuine replacement batteries while they’re available!
I have an aging XPS 13 and of course, Dell have discontinued the battery line. Opened it up one day and every cell had puffed out. It took buying a couple of fakes before finally finding a decent reseller on eBay who stocked what I needed. The fake batteries were not recognised by Dell’s hardware detection system thing, I imagine lots of other manufacturers might implement the same feature.
You will eventually have to replace it when there are no replacement batteries. Get one that’s focused on repairability. Then you can basically keep it forever
It’s often too late to realize it’s non repairable. When reviews first come out, no one reviews the drm on components. Even those teardown sites only cover how hard it is to open up a device but don’t cover if a part is drm’d until moths or years later. Because there is no way to know until 3rd party parts come out and they don’t work.
Given how dell AC adapters are the only ones that I know of with an extra wire that functionally just acts as drm, it’s not surprising they do the same with batteries.
Even HP’s elitebook I got (6th Gen Intel CPUs) work no problem with third party batteries and HP has all of the drm printer nonsense. Curiously if their modern elitebook have battery drm yet.
That’s what I’m still doing now. I upgraded the RAM a couple years ago and the GPU last year, both with cheap older parts that were about $100.
The main problem I’ve run into so far is that Blender no longer runs since they only support CPUs ten years old or newer. But I don’t do that stuff anymore really anyway.
Yeah, once my Zephyrus dies I’ve decided that it’s my last “new” laptop that I buy. Sure, it can play games, but my usage has been drifting more “casual” over the years. For the top end of my computing: I really don’t need much to compile stuff and run chitubox.
How easy is it to get replacement parts for a ThinkPad?
17 year old Dell here. Threw a SSD and Linux on it and that damn thing boots faster than most brand new Desktops. Absolutely enough to surf the web, listen to music, watch videos or do the usual Linux stuff (ssh, etc.). You can even somewhat game on it via sunshine/moonlight.
I did the same with a Dell Wyse thin client laptop I acquired from work. Upgraded the RAM, popped a larger SSD into it, and installed Debian. Thing works great for the basics and I just RDP into my desktop for more intensive tasks.
Old laptops will still run pretty good if you run lightweight Linux distribution and give it some RAM upgrade and maybe SSD as well. I still wouldn’t use them as my main computer, as I’d rather have a lot better specs and ability to run Win10/Win11 flawlessly, but it’s still a good option.
Same here. My old graphics chip wouldnt boot with anything else (I could have searched for the driver somewhere) except lxqt. Thats why I chose lubuntu.
It is pretty awesome for old hardware imo. I tried 5 or six other major distros and nothing worked, inclusing mint, ubuntu, debian (I think) and so on.
All I have is a 13 year old laptop, and I use it basically all day most days. It’s plays music and movies etc with no issues. Cloud pc for gaming, which also works perfectly. It really doesn’t like youtube, though, and it sounds like a jet engine every time system and app updates start to download. Can’t afford to get anything better anyway. A friend gave it to me after it died on him and he got a new one, wasn’t hard to fix. I cried when I got it because it improved my life a lot, just being able to do basic things.
Yeah, I try to keep it clean. I’m pretty sure the fan has been warped, so one of the blades drags against the housing a bit, and I don’t have the tools to open it up that much to try to fix it. It only happens at high fan speeds, though, and that doesn’t happen often enough to be truly annoying.
I use GeForce Now. It fits my needs and the games I like to play. Why pay for my own gaming rig when I can rent it and let others cover the upgrading cost?
There are a few services that allow you to play with the actual game being rendered on remote computers, while your pc only shows the image and sends the input commands. I think the more popular ones are xcloud and geforce now. There are also a few smaller services that allow you to run anything you’d like, without limitations.
I use Shadow, you literally get a high-end PC you stream to any device in real time and can do whatever you want with. Other cloud gaming services only streams the games, so you can’t use mods, emulators, etc. Currently playing Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora on max settings, and it’s buttery smooth. I also use it for anything else that my laptop can’t handle like image and video editing, 3d modelling and rendering.
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