Solved Making good use of spare Laptops and Desktops

Hi, I have never posted before in this forum but I do follow the site frequently. I really appreciate the content creators for taking time for the elaborate posts on almost all as aspects of Windows. I have a question, I have like around 10-15 laptops and desktops(ranging from 10 year old to latest) lying around in my office. What good use can I put them to? Any thoughts? I would really appreciate it. I am thinking of below.

1. Selfhost every build of Windows - But beyond that what else can we do?
2. I am also thinking of trying every major Linux distro on them(Sorry if this not the right forums to discuss about it).

Sorry this is not the appropriate forum for the above question.

I would take a decent one and use it for a backup system, perhaps for sensitive data and precious files, and not even connect to the internet.

ntoslinux said:

1. I am also thinking of trying every major Linux distro on them(Sorry if this not the right forums to discuss about it).

Sorry this is not the appropriate forum for the above question.

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NO worry about that. Many of us have experience with Linux and we discuss it here.

Unless they are REALLY old, I would contact your school system and speak to their IT department. Ask if they have a need of them or know of any organization that could distribute them to worthy receipients like shut-in people, senior citizen homes, etc. An old sytem with a few simple games installed on it could help these folks pass the time.

Contact you public library. They might have a need for the PCs..

People are always giving me their old laptops. I clean install the latest OS they are capable of running, install several old packs of games I've had forever and have spread them out over the nursing homes around town. The nurses set them up a few hours a day in their rec room for the patients they deem fit to use them. I've given several directly to a few nursing home residents who the nurses felt were still capable enough to have them in their rooms. One home took one of the better laptops and connected it to their big screen TV. They play dvds, stream old movies from Youtube, etc. I offered to keep them running as long as I'm able, but surprisingly I don't get called very often.

Keep in mind these places do not usually have their own IT department so you or someone else should clean install windows before donating them. If the school wants any of them, they can do the install, but remove your hard drive first.

I don't know about where you live, but Goodwill here takes any kind of computer to their recycle center where handicapped people strip any usable components. They love to get the really old ones that still used gold contacts. I believe the handicapped workers get paid a small amount from the stuff they strip and sell. Again, you would want to remove the hard drive first. Call your local Goodwill to see if they have the same service.

I use an old AMD FX-8370 Eight-Core Processor system as a NAS.

Thanks a lot everyone.

1. On one of the oldest laptop(which doesn't even have a track pad :)) I am running openmediavault for NAS. Working great.
2. Definitely I will consider donating a few. They might be helpful for folks who are in need than collecting dust in my office.

I wanted to add one more thing. Most times, these old units are not used to access the internet so it doesn't matter what OS you put on them. In fact Windows 7 is probably the most preferred one for the elderly for game playing. They like the old games like Tetris, Bejeweled, solitaire, and they love dominoes and 42. If you go this route, let me know and I can upload some of my games to the cloud for you.

glasskuter said:

I wanted to add one more thing. Most times, these old units are not used to access the internet so it doesn't matter what OS you put on them. In fact Windows 7 is probably the most preferred one for the elderly for game playing. They like the old games like Tetris, Bejeweled, solitaire, and they love dominoes and 42. If you go this route, let me know and I can upload some of my games to the cloud for you.

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Thanks for the help! I did install Windows 7 on other Lenovo T410 laptop. Feel free to upload the games when you have some free cycles :)

Almost any PC / laptop can run Linux which makes for an excellent NAS / file server. The main problem with really old PC's is that in order to get any sort of sensible size of disks for NAS - you'll need external connectors -- especially if it's a laptop and USB2 these days won't really cut decent file serving / media streaming or even backing up large volumes of data.

IDE disks are also a pain so the computer should have at least a USB3 port if being used as a file server.

However if you can fit a decent size SSD into a laptop (Or take the case off and use the sata connector to attach an external HDD enclosure then "You are in business".

Linux can run on MBR / UEFI etc and if you don't need a GUI the OS can be quite tiny. !!!! You can also run W11 VM's provided the CPU is powerful enough and there's enough RAM in the system. Even slowish DDR 2 stuff will work.

Another use is simply to use as an Emailer (set up your own email server) or as an Internet gateway / proxy server.

XP works well also on these types of machines and you can always use the machine as a "Dumb terminal" e.g RDP to wremote Windows machines etc.



Cheers
jimbo

Hi Jimbo, that's a great idea. Luckily, I also happen to have a good number of SSDs ranging from 120GB to 500GB with me. So the first thing I'm doing is replacing the old HDDs in these laptops with SSDs. Unfortunately, when it comes to RAM, it's hard to find DDR2 or older RAM modules for these laptops. But most of them have at least 4GB of RAM, which should be sufficient for NAS or other similar use cases.

I have been trying to set up a personal email server myself, but I haven't been able to find a decent tutorial. Most of the tutorials I found are slightly more complicated than what I can comprehend. The reason for this is that I subscribed to the Linux Kernel mailing list on my personal Gmail ID once, and the quota almost finished in a month or so. Any pointers here would be very helpful.

Now that I think about VM/Remote Desktop, maybe I can make use of one of the desktops as a Proxmox server and create VMs, say a collection of all Windows versions from XP :)