Ask HN: What should I do with my old laptop?
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...
Comments
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.
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.
It is easy to think "but everyone has access to a computer" and while that is mostly true having your own computer is very different from access to one.
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.
It's a good use of them, but just realize that most people you donate a laptop to don't have internet access at home - other than on their phone. Don't count on them just downloading X and Y and load it up with everything you can ahead of time.
I tried this once. All the local groups that took computers only wanted machines less than 5 years old, and even then only if they were capable of running the latest OS (ie win 8/10). Obviously my definition of "end of life" is different than most and I decided to continue using the machine. In fact, I am typing this on said machine. Continued use is better than recycling.
Having been on the receiving end of charitable laptop donations (working at a school in the Third World), I fully understand and sympathize with this 5-year-rule. You wouldn't believe what kind of crappy old laptops get donated - absolutely useless stuff. All too often, the only thing you gain out of a well-meant donation is the hassle of disposing of a piece of junk. Of course there are still laptops that are older than five years and still work fine, but you have to draw the line somewhere.
Fortunately I have not had this problem but I can imagine it being one. A lot of recycling systems are very picky about electronics. Sad as my main machine is 5 years old! (ThinkPad T420s).
Why "slap Ubuntu on it?" Personally I use Fedora but don't see the reason why he should change the operating system...
Of course the OS choice is up to you :) I could/should have said "slap Linux on it" but as I pretty much only use Ubuntu on my personal computers I write Ubuntu out of habit now. Fedora is a fine choice as well. Just don't stick Arch or Gentoo on it unless you also include your phone number for support ;)
First Option: Donate it (as @cbanek and other have suggested)
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).
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.
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).
Any particular implementations of generic assistant that you can recommend? Sounds intriguing...
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.
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?
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)
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.
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.
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?
Where are you at in Puerto Rico? I am in San Juan, and have a laptop I can give you. Would be happy to help a fellow-geek.
Overlooking Adjuntas. We wanted to go somewhere with perfect weather and Adjuntas fits that bill :-)
Shout out! We're moving there in the next couple of years to grow coffee.
We'll be in Ponce in August (that's where we know the most people, so we'll rent there for a year or two while learning the ropes from some coffee-grower friends and looking for the right land).
You're picking a great place to live. The people are friendly, fairly low crime rate, and the weather is amazing. I don't think it's been over 80 since I've been here.
Everyone here grows coffee or bananas, so make sure you're not planning to sell locally.
Water and Electric are inconsistent. Make sure wherever you live has a backup water tank that you keep filled and that your fancy electronics are on a good surge protector or better yet a UPS. It wouldn't be a bad idea to get an inexpensive generator.
Internet is available too! alphanetwireless.com is a local WISP that serves the valley and surrounding mountains. I pay $60 for a 10 down/4 up connection if I remember correctly. Uptime is about 99%. Strong mobile phone signals in the area too across at least 3 different networks my visitors have had.
Downsides? Not a lot of variety in restaurants. Most stuff is fried. Chinese food even comes with french fries. Also, berries are rare and expensive.
My email is in my profile. Send me a message if you have any questions.
Ha. I know all that. We lived in Puerto Rico for five years a couple years back.
No, local sales are not at all profitable. The wholesale price of coffee is fixed to benefit the big roasters - our plan is to roast it ourselves and sell retail online as a boutique brand serving the mainland. Our friends already do this, and do OK with it.
The electricity is fine in Ponce (water can be a temporary issue there, too, but every house has a tank); when we do come to Adjuntas, we'll be building a solar house, ideally somewhere with its own spring water.
No hurry. It's PR. :-)
I guess it depends on where you live. I'd search for some sort of giveaway communities on Facebook or elsewhere online. It will probably be something local, due to shipping costs etc. For example in Croatia I give old hardware away over:
- poklanjanje.com ( https://www.facebook.com/Poklanjanje-142113603722 )
- cipele46 ( https://www.facebook.com/Cipele46 , http://cipele46.org/ )
You may have to go to a more urban area, but look for local techie Meetups or a local makerspace / hackerspace. Or reach out to some remote ones where you know people. We have dozens of laptops sitting at our local hackerspace. Get to know them, help out with a project, etc. and there's plenty of gear to be had.
My wife has floated the idea of moving somewhere ultracheap for a year to save up money while I work remote. Aside from ant and power issues, how was your experience otherwise?
We probably wouldn't move to Puerto Rico, but likely somewhere cheap on the mainland - maybe Texas, or somewhere in the midwest.
I just replied up in the thread, but overall the experience has been great. It was just too much of a culture shock for my wife and kids.
If you're looking for an inexpensive place on the mainland, I would suggest looking at small towns (under 10k people) adjacent to agricultural areas. Areas near or in the Appalachian Mountains would likely be beautiful and inexpensive, albeit a bit neglected culturally.
PR was hard to get set up because we couldn't move our possessions and had to start from scratch here. It also was difficult because there isn't a culture of "charity shops" that I was used to. Without a salvation army or goodwill or even garage sales, we had to buy everything new or travel for hours to find a store that sold used appliances.
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.
How is customs going to be any different whether or not eBay facilitated the sale?
Shipping it as a gift usually works.
No, it doesn't.
usually. I live in a Third World country and I pay significantly less fees when the item has been declared as a gift.
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.
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.
So, if you're looking to use your old laptop for something novel, I suggest:
1. Turn it into a TERM server.
2. Turn it into a media center with KODI(XMBC).
3. Turn it into a game server.
4. Put Windows Server onto it and build a home domain.
5. Install a different OS than your main laptop and use it interchangeably.
6. Use it for projects that may put your main laptop into danger (water, high voltage, etc.).
7. Plug a Kinect into it and turn it into a machine vision robot.
8. Add it to a BlenderGrid with all of your other computers and teach yourself 3D animation.
9. Install it into your car as a carputer / wardriving rig.
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.
[1] https://kodi.tv/
Good idea but remember that old computers were not much power efficient. In this and other scenarios you should evaluate how much you'll pay for power and compare it with the cost of a new appliance plus its probably smaller power bill. I confess I didn't research media center solutions but in this case a HDMI compute stick would probably consume far less power than a Core 2 Duo laptop (you might have something more power efficient). You must add the cost and power bill of the storage, unless it's already available and on for all the time you'll use the media center.
I did this, but with Plex (I am a Plex user across multiple devices). I use the computer in clamshell mode with HDMI to my living room TV.
Also, I use Rowmote[0] to control the computer -- an old Macbook -- from my phone and run OpenEmu[1] next to Plex for a home arcade solution. I use a Bluetooth PS3 controller for the arcade. SNES works great with Sixaxis controllers, N64 is possible. Havent tried Dolphin[2] yet... But looking forward to it.
Late 2011 MBP for the curious, runs great for the above uses.
0. http://regularrateandrhythm.com/apps/rowmote-pro/ 1. http://openemu.org/ 2. https://dolphin-emu.org/
If you use the SC drivers to turn the PS3 controller into an Xbox controller you can use that to control Plex Home Theatre as well. The Plex mobile apps also work as remotes.
Using a PS3 controller will work in Dolphin, but you'll need multiple controller profiles (think Wiimote + nun chuck, Wiimote sideways, Classic Controller, etc).
Retroarch takes a bit of the pain of setting up different controllers for emulators.
Plex is my top use for a somewhat old laptop. I have an i3 Lenovo with a broken screen running as a headless Plex server (plus Calibre, a little light web hosting, etc.) It's the first media solution that the whole family actually uses.
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
http://www.neverware.com/
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.
Is it networked? Just wondering about the possibility of time-drift
It is actually! I've got an absolutely ancient PCMCIA wifi card that only supports 802.11b, but that's enough to connect to wifi and sync with NTP servers. Without it, the time drift is really bad, about 5-10 minutes/month.
I'm always amazed how bad time drift is with non NTP synced systems. I have a couple very inexpensive Timex Quartz analog watches that manage a month without any drift that I notice (they get reset when I need to reset the date wheel).
Run ArchiveTeam Warrior -- http://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=ArchiveTeam_Warri... to help the Internet Archive create archival copies of websites and services that are being decommissioned.
Also BOINC from UC Berkeley -- http://boinc.berkeley.edu/ -- to volunteer your processor cycles to scientific research. E.g. the current OpenZika project:
https://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/research/zika/overview.do
I use mine as a cat heater.
I doubt a laptop could raise the temperature of a cat to a safe cooking temperature.
Ceiling cat called. He wants his Prescott back. He is threatening to switch to AMD's FX-9590 unless Intel comes up with a warmer processor a.s.a.p.
Funny thing is that FX-9590 max temp is 61C. In comparision 61C is consider "normal" on i5-6500 with stock cooler under heavy load.
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.
Bear in mind though that if an older laptop displaces a comparably priced older desktop it's likely to use significantly less energy. Typical power consumption is likely to be under 30 watts even for most older laptops, with peaks still well under 100.
They still consume power and generate heat. If you want something truly low power, the Raspberry Pi 3 is actually quite capable. Add on the 7" touch-screen display and it's amazing what it can do on a handful of watts.
Yes, I understand that the Vespa can do amazing things, is fun to ride and is very economical to use. Still, I was actually looking for a car.
How energy efficient is the recycling process? This includes transporting old electronics to somewhere else to be "recycled".
Which recycling services would you recommend? What assurances do they provide that it will be responsibly handled? Stories like this make me think that keeping the device, even shoved into the back of my closet, is a better idea: https://theintercept.com/2016/05/10/gps-tracking-devices-cat...
Besides, manufacturing a new device has certain environmental costs, and there's the money I'd have to pay for it, as well. What's the point where the manufacture+lifetime energy of a new device crosses the energy-use line of my current machine?
If you don't want another wind turbine then fire up a nuke plant or two.
DONATE to http://www.computerswithcauses.org/
This option is refreshingly direct, for this thread.
Run pfSense on it as your router, using VLANs to make use of the single NIC on it.
I've done this myself, and it was a great learning tool.
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.
We are always collecting them for a program that teaches kids to code in South Africa....anything 10 years old or newer works great for them.
I have an old laptop in SA. Could you link to details of the programme?
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.
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.
Admittedly, this is a somewhat contrived use case, but I like automation and repurposing old hardware :D
You could make a smart mirror using the monitor behind a one-way mirror. Haven't done it myself but I've seen tutorials online before.
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.
A bit off-topic, but old phones and tablets make great clocks for around the house!
And as @haser_au suggests, great information panels.
Donation is probably the best way to use it.
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. https://cdn.hackaday.io/images/resize/600x600/61801513953197... 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.
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.
VPN server. I've been using a Raspberry Pi for this purpose for a while now.
Check out Pi Hole as well to block ads: https://pi-hole.net/
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.
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.
#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.
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.
Using it in a robot or something sounds fun, but I'm more likely to use a Rasberry Pi or Arduino for that.
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.
Modern CPU's and systems can do much better than that. A colleague of mine has a Dell XPS 13, and with the screen off it sips ~3.4W being mostly idle (running Unity desktop doing nothing). I was surprised by this, since the last time I took the time to optimize my laptop's power consumption was in 2010, when 17W was a respectable result.
It's not just the CPU, either. M.2 SSD's are quite a bit more power efficient than SATA, and when you're going to low single digit power usage, even those things start to stack up.
LibertyBSD, learn to use bundled FVWM2 , install SPlayer - Seamonkey - Rox.
Set up ~/.fvwm2rc. Copy it and hack it a lot. Enjoy an ultrafast machine.
Run SMPlayer, search for the option "Skip loop filter", enable it for HD videos.
Get Audacious, you'd need some background music to relax yourself.
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.
donate it to me. im a poor high school student who is looking to get a mac computer to sart iOS development.
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.
http://www.relentlessplay.com/broken-laptop-cool-utility-mon...
Run Tensorflow stuff on it
Will it blend?
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.
Xubuntu + MPD = Wireless Music Player For your home ;)
Reformat it and put an emulation-focussed distro on it.
You could then practice your hardware modification skills and fit it into a different box.
RDP terminal, Asterisk pbx, web server, local/cloud file server, torrent uploads/downloads, tiny core system
Create your own home VPN, useful on restrictive network environments like office, school.
Owncloud server or similar. Having control over your "cloud" is invaluable.
I put an undemanding Linux on it and passed it to my 6-year-old daughter.
I just my old netbook as CI sever for all my projects, even the simplest.
Give it to kids! (yours or someone else's)
They'd love taking one apart.
Make it as a free VPN/VPS for other to connect to...
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.
Starting to get into Raspberry Pi territory — low cost and low power consumption although you need to bring your own external disk.
technical specs?
just keep it，after decades，it would be your memory
Beowulf cluster
Puppy Linux!
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!
If it's an Intel laptop with an Intel ME the op is already out of luck.
It's tech. In 10 years the spying tools of that time won't be compatible with current Intel ME chips.
Implying the government doesn't run on hardware that is at least ten years old.
It only runs on proven technology that's no less than 30 years old.
If it's an AMD, chances are pretty high as well.
It will be even more useless in 10 years than it is now. Think that technology changes, there are new hardware standards, soon you won't be able to use pendrive without having webUSB driver installed.
There will probably be no USB. All data in the cloud. Printer, Keyboard etc. will connect using Wifi or something.
But no security updates.
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!
Besides giving it away- use it a backup, personal repository, remote server for times you don't want to carry a laptop with you...?
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.
Can you elaborate? You seem to be saying that the HDMI or VGA socket in a laptop can also act as an input instead of just an output? That intrigues me, though I'd also be really surprised if it were the case.
You could potentially use one of those wireless display technologies (Miracast, I think it's called) and setup the computer as a sink, but the software seemed far from usable when I tried that a year ago.
Use it as embedded controller in a side project.