I’ve recently bought a Lenovo ThinkPad T480, i5-8350U, 16GB, 256GB SSD, which does everything I need from a laptop (I mainly use my desktop PC anyway).
My old laptop is a Travelmate 5720, Core 2 Duo T7300, 4GB, 128GB SSD. It boots fairly quickly and it’s usable for basic stuff like browsing, but running Windows 10 the CPU is at 99% most of the time just from the background Windows processes, so the noisy fan is running at full speed, and doing Windiws updates takes ages
It’s not worth spending any money to upgrade the RAM or SSD, but I could replace the DVD drive with a spare 256GB that I’ve got. The current SSD is almost full but that’s because I’ve got dual-boot Windows and Linux installed, so if I was only running Linux it would probably be sufficient.
Before I scrap it (I’ll keep the SSD), I was just wondering if there’s anything that it might be better suited for than my desktop, laptop, M700 SFF PC (which is my main self-hosted machine and backup server) and my various RPis?
Maybe being portable gives it an advantage for some task over the other machines? The battery isn’t great, probably runs for an hour or so, but at least I can disconnect it from the power and move it around without shutting it down, and it will keep running for a while if there’s a powercut, or I have to turn off the mains to do some DIY. Of course, my modem/router wouldn’t have any power then, not would any of my other PCs, but I could use my phone as a temporary hotspot to maintain connectivity for whatever is running on the laptop.
Or maybe having a keyboard and monitor gives it some advantages over the RPi for some particular task I haven’t thought of? The M700 won’t have a keyboard or monitor connected most of the time either, but I’m not sure it matters when I can just SSH or VNC into these machines from my desktop.
Or maybe there’s some software I might want to run permanently on a dedicated machine, rather than having it on my new laptop or my desktop, where I need to reboot into Linux or Windows for different tasks (and with the new laptop I’ll sometimes want to take it out with me), so they won’t be able to run any software permanently? Although if that’s the only reason, a RPi would probably be just as good for this.
I repurposed an old laptop that wasn’t running very well by taking the guts out of it and stuffing it into an old 1U server chassis and installed Proxmox on bare metal.
Currently running a HAOS VM, Docker in an LXC, and I’m in the process of trying to set up WireGuard in an LXC.
I honestly can’t remember the exact specs of the laptop, but it’s very old, and with what I’m currently running I’ve still got tons of overhead left.
I do have a monitor/kbm plugged into it and I’m running XFCE just incase I want to check on something locally while I’m downstairs, but generally the monitor is turned off (in case the power goes out, it won’t be an unnecessary drain on my UPS) and I just ssh in or use one of the Web-GUI’s, depending on the service I’m working on at the time.
I hadn’t thought of putting the guts into another case. I don’t think I’ll do that with this laptop, as it’s running OK and it has a functional monitor and kbm (mostly, the v key is a bit unreliable), but if I definitely wanted to use it as a headless machine to run 24/7 off the mains (with a UPS backup instead of the battery) that would be an option.