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.
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.