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Ask HN: What should I do with my old laptop?

139 points by th3o6a1d ↗ HN
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...

115 comments

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prymitive
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.
voltagex_
How energy efficient is the recycling process? This includes transporting old electronics to somewhere else to be "recycled".
fencepost
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.
astrodust
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.
fencepost
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.
khedoros
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?

J_Darnley
If you don't want another wind turbine then fire up a nuke plant or two.
glenda
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.
supersan
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/

hbosch
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/

ja27
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.
mikewhy
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.

pmontra
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.
cbanek
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.

haser_au
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).

burkesquires
Any particular implementations of generic assistant that you can recommend? Sounds intriguing...
hackathonguy
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.
eli
How is customs going to be any different whether or not eBay facilitated the sale?
curiousgal
Shipping it as a gift usually works.
nathancahill
No, it doesn't.
curiousgal
usually. I live in a Third World country and I pay significantly less fees when the item has been declared as a gift.
Lorenzo45
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.
tony-allan
A bit off-topic, but old phones and tablets make great clocks for around the house!

And as @haser_au suggests, great information panels.

gambiting
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.
barbs
Is it networked? Just wondering about the possibility of time-drift
gambiting
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.
peatmoss
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).
vacri
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!
LAMike
Run Tensorflow stuff on it
Daneel_
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.

ekr
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.
sspiff
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.

milankragujevic
donate it to me. im a poor high school student who is looking to get a mac computer to sart iOS development.
89vision
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.
tony-allan
Starting to get into Raspberry Pi territory — low cost and low power consumption although you need to bring your own external disk.
lgleason
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.
sixhobbits
I have an old laptop in SA. Could you link to details of the programme?
bbcbasic
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!
emsy
If it's an Intel laptop with an Intel ME the op is already out of luck.
hbogert
If it's an AMD, chances are pretty high as well.
Scarblac
It's tech. In 10 years the spying tools of that time won't be compatible with current Intel ME chips.
adrianN
Implying the government doesn't run on hardware that is at least ten years old.
cptskippy
It only runs on proven technology that's no less than 30 years old.
akerro
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.
bbcbasic
There will probably be no USB. All data in the cloud. Printer, Keyboard etc. will connect using Wifi or something.
sc0rt
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

barbs
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.
OneNoteIsFree
Besides giving it away- use it a backup, personal repository, remote server for times you don't want to carry a laptop with you...?
keithpeter
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.