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What To Do With Old Laptops?
An anonymous reader writes "I've recently acquired a few old P2/P3 laptops. Most either work properly but are slow, or have various problems with power supplies and/or batteries. Attempting to sell them would probably earn less than the cost of shipping, so that's out of the question. I was hoping the Slashdot crowd could give me some ideas on what to do with these old computers. As somebody who already has ~10 computers lying around the house there is certainly no need for an additional computer to 'experiment' with, so I was hoping for some more creative suggestions."
...I'd taken an old P2 200, flipped the screen around, threw a wireless card in it, and made a digital picture frame for my grandmother for Mother's Day two years ago. Been meaning to revisit that project. Another option is just as a heads-up display. I've got an old Compaq Presario hanging off my wall which does nothing but shell outputs of the status of my network, as well as a buffer for the latest SNMP traps. It blinks in big red text if anything goes particularly sideways (fatal trap). Took a fair bit of scripting, but it was fun.
Informatus Technologicus
Fix em up if you can and give em to a kids. I'm sure you could get at least a couple goin out of the pile, no?
I've put win2k on them and they seem to be fine for this purpose.
I'm not anti-social, I'm anti-idiot.
I use old laptops for things like serving up web pages, running an FTP site, portable web-cam host, print server, file server, repeater, router or whatever other services where a power efficient, portable computer can be used. If you have it set up to run a single service or two, then performance is not going to be that big of an issue.
For a web server, for example. I install a low-overhead Linux distro with Apache, ssh and maybe vnc and copy my www directory to it. BAM! Web server! It uses less power than any of my PC's, and it allows me to reboot my "real" machine without taking the web page down.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
I use a Kurobox (266MHz PowerPC w/ 128MB RAM) running TorrentFlux as a Bittorrent server; it functions remarkably well. I'm sure those laptops are at least as powerful as that.
Most laptops fit easily in racks, and can be used either as consoles or VNC terminals. They can basically function as the poor man's rack KVM and display & I/O tray. Another thing more relevant to the first use is that OLD laptops still mostly have real serial ports and all, whereas those are getting harder and harder to find on new laptops.
Thin clients. Install a wifi card and mount one to the wall or cabinets in your kitchen. No battery necessary. Install LTSP or similar on a server and bammo! Instant kitchen terminal.
My blog
Use them as control terminals (one for each room, maybe in the wall somewhere) and servers for your houses living controls: thermostat, phone, tv, music, lighting, and maybe some web-cams and other security features, to name the big ones I'd want.
Install Freenet 0.7, give it a small bandwidth allotment and a huge datastore, hook it up to your router, and keep it running. You'll be helping people all over the world to communicate securely and anonymously.
Ok, just kidding... Well sort of. I don't know if it helps you out or not, but I know what I would do if I had an extra laptop or two lying around. I would repurpose one of them into a laptop for my 4 year old. He loves using the computer for TuxPaint and other games. I have an old computer that I set up for him, but my house's layout keeps it from being in a convenient spot for him to use. A laptop could be used by him on the couch, on the floor, in the car (while the battery lasted at least), or anywhere else. If you have any young nieces/nephews or if you have friends with young children, you could see if they want a laptop with Edubuntu installed. And speaking of Linux....
;-)
After having a laptop for my son, I would install Linux on a second spare laptop to play around with/learn Linux. Again, I'm not sure if this applies to you or not. I run Windows on all of my machines. I've wanted to try Linux out and have run a few LiveCDs (both boot-to-CD and inside VMWare), but it would be nice to have a whole system boot into Linux to try out. My two laptops are right now my work laptop (they probably wouldn't like it if I messed something up during my Linux install) and my wife's laptop (she definitely wouldn't like it if I messed something up during the Linux install). With an extra laptop, I could mess up and not really care about anything going wrong. From what I've heard, Linux shouldn't have a problem with the older systems (though I could be horribly wrong... I'm sure other users could clarify this point). So you could use one laptop as a test bed for various purposes. Get a nice system setup going, make an image of it, play around until the system is messed up, restore the image, play around some more, repeat.
Of course, if you seriously consider sending out old laptops to folks here, can I be the first in line?
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
But why not build an image wall placing them side by side and play something using X-Windows.
Just install Linux with X11 on each and you have a multi-screen solution!
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Hehe, having run over stuff with a D9, I can attest to how much fun this is. (FYI everybody, D6 and D9 are models of Caterpillar crawlers)
KDE (and other window managers) makes inverting the screen trivial. mount the laptop upside down under the cabinet like one of those Bose CD players. The screen flips down like in a minivan DVD player.
Add a wireless keyboard and (as you said) bammo!
I'd rather have someone respond than be modded up.
I've been thinking I'll use old laptops as slideshow displays (explanations) for science projects at Maker Faire. Better than lugging around desktops. Only problem is the prices seem to be either inflated or so low no one will sell them because the shipping exceeds the cost..
Not sure that this applies to you or not, but if you're a member of any organizations that do public exhibitions it's worth looking into.
the picture frame would be a nice toy. I wouldn't want to do more than one though.
Have you thought about donating them to your local ARES/RACES group? Old laptop can sometimes mean they use less power. this is ideal when the laptop is being used as a terminal to a Packet TNC.
The groups are volunteers so they welcome equipment donations. Contact your county EOC to find out who's in charge.
Yep, I never spell check.
More incorrect spellings can be found he
Attach some wooden legs to them and use them as end tables. I have made many a nice furniture piece using old computers. Including a coffee table, night stands, and even a fish tank. The last one isn't finished yet because of leak issues.
Somewhere in a dark place you will find:
www.m1
Any laptop with a real serial port will be treated like gold and gladly put to good use at any research lab as a data logging tool connecting to some oddball piece of scientific equipment. Computers age much faster than instruments, and so often the interface software needs some old out of date OS and hardware to run. Try giving a call to the research focused department of your choice at your local university- and try and talk to the lab folk doing research, not the IT support who deal with student & email issues.
~.~
I'm a peripheral visionary.
I have an old PII/266 which runs DSL (Damn Small Linux) very nicely. I put XMMS on it, and hooked the speaker out to one of the alternate audio inputs on my stereo. It's not phenomenally high quality stereo, but at least better than most FM reception, and you've got hundreds (thousands?) of online radio stations to pick from.
DSL has some problems, such as shutting down the system if I close the lid on the laptop, and then not recovering the ethernet connection when I open it up again, but for the most part, it's better than tossing out the laptop. It's a lot smaller and cleaner looking than trying to get a full blown system with a monitor and keyboard to do the same thing.
Your Servant, B. Baggins
The one reason that older Laptops retain value after their life expectancy have run out is that they are complete compact computers that comes with screen, keyboard, storage ready to use right there and now.
...yes..it's more compatible with my old style centronic port rather than those windowsy modern equivalents that absolutely wants to control all the hardware by itself... this old unit has full "dos" control and can run old "protel" software to create those Nice Direct-to-plotter pcb layouts that make the life of a nerd a bit easier and cheaper.
What do I use them for?
I've refurbished one of the smallest laptops in the world (3010ct) from Toshiba (Weighs around 1.2 kg) as a lightweight practical surfing machine that I can take with me anywhere (take THAT pricey Macbook AIR!) cost me 15 dollars plus 10 bucks for the wireless CF card + adapter - downloaded some russian win 98 usb hack to give it usb powers + some wifi cf hack to give it wifi...voila...it's a fantastic Wireless surfer.
I've got a couple of nice IBM 600's that I've turned into portable Commodore 64's! Thanks to FRODO it instantly boots into a Commodore 64 within 10 seconds (take THAT you SLOW SLOOOW booting modern pcs that take 1-2 minutes to boot win xp!) This one can play all the cool games of our past years...and provide a nice prototyping platform to quickly try out some programming theories...
I've turned my Olivetti Echos 100E into a super-Eprom-Programming station! Yes - Todays modern PCs'doesnt come with Parallel or Serial ports (sure...usb is some sort of ultra fast serial port..but it doesnt work...and converterboards suck in general so...) I use this one to burn EPROMS with those nice 80-90's eprom programmers!
I've turned my other laptop into a Plotting Machine to make PCB's (Printed Circuit boards)
So yes - There's life in them old lappies still! I love'em!
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
db
I am literally 3000 tokens away from the chaotic crossbow --Stephen
I recently heard from someone who manages a mailroom in a large firm that _none_ of her staff knew how to type, so they were really unable to apply to move up to any other job in the organization.
They were locked into the low end job slot.
I got an old laptop, erased Windows from its tiny old hard drive, set it up to boot DOS (FreeDOS, I think) and installed an autoexec file to run an old copy of Typing Tutor III -- which is still probably the best thing going to learn the home row then slowly add keys and build speed and sequences.
You can still find it for sale, look around.
No eye candy, no other programs, no mouse, nothing to fiddle with.
It remembers different people so they all are using it -- and now they're competing with each other to get faster and better.
Typing Tutor was an incredible simple DOS program.
Enter your name. It remembers where you left off and what you need next.
And it has a lovely little Letter Invaders game -- falling letters, lower case and upper case, that's tied to your current level of keyboard experience.
Put headphones on the laptop so nobody bothers the student because of the music it plays.
There's _no_garbage_ on this setup. I pulled out the floppy/CD drive modules.
All it does is -- teach people to type.
Show them just the home row ASDF JKL; and tell them where to put their fingers at the start.
That's all you need.
** I know it seems incredible but there are a _lot_ of adults still who never learned to use a keyboard. Poor family. Poor schools with no tech at all. No tools, no teachers.
Help someone out with your old laptops. Set one up so you know it works as needed and then shop it around.
Figure it's a throwaway -- tie it down maybe, but make clear it's a doorstop, tell people they can borrow it, take it home, it's not worth stealing.
All it can do is teach.