Low-Powered Personal Servers?

antifoidulus asks: "Being the proud owner of a PowerBook, I have but one complaint when it comes to my computing experience: the lack of an 'always-on' web/database server that would allow me to work on some personal programming projects, since I don't like having my PowerBook on 24/7. I could just buy an Intel box, but looking at some of the horror stories of how much power P4s consume, and living in Germany where electricity is not cheap, I wanted to see what suggestions the Slashdot community has for low-cost, low-power, headless servers. My only requirements are that it can run Linux and preferably cost less than $500. Is this possible? What architecture should I go with?"

Comments

Low Power, Small Size, try an old laptop.

[DoubleD]

Specifically old laptops with bad screens or batteries that do not work anymore can be quite cheap.

For example here is an old IBM thinkpad with a battery that does not hold a charge for 150 euro.
http://paris.craigslist.org/sys/92369116.html

Adding a PCMCIA NIC should not be too expensive.

If you want a really cheap system I bet you can find an old pentium or pentium 2 system someone is discarding or recycling.