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."

Comments

Re:It has to be said...

[seededfury]

why not come up with an original joke? that way you won't be so worried about taking a hit...

Re:Bonfire

[Smidge204]

Hey wow, someone decided to be my ill-gotten doppelganger! I feel so relevant now... or maybe I need a dose of Pepto-Bismol.

If your posting history is any indication, I should thank you in advance for not sullying my reputation.

The Original Smidge TwoZeroFour - Often irritated, never duplicated! Accept no substitutes!
=Smidge=

Please, anything but BASIC

[Dogtanian]

I taught 9-year-olds "KidBasic" using Win98 boxes, and they had a blast! Alarm bells started ringing when I read this. I was happy to cut it some slack... perhaps it's a "modern" BASIC that doesn't encourage all those horrific programming practices that damaged a generation of programmers. So I Google it, get its home page and see...

BASIC-256 is an easy to use version of BASIC designed to teach young children the basics of computer programming. It uses traditional control structures like gosub, for/next, and goto, which helps kids easily see how program flow-control works. No, it's the old-fashioned spaghetti BASIC.

I can't describe exactly what I felt when I read this, but I think downheartedness and indignation were mixed in there. I'm sure that the people running this project are well-meaning, but this is a FUCKING HORRIBLE thing to be teaching kids to program with. This isn't 25 years ago, you don't even have the excuse that you're using an underpowered late-70s/early-80s microcomputer.

Sure, trad BASICs probably mirror the underlying flow of the machine more than modern structured languages- but if that's what you're doing, I'd still use some pseudo-machine code tool. If you want to teach them programming in a fun way, I'm also damn sure that there must be modern languages that are easy to get into and use, but which don't rely on GOTO and GOSUB.

Old-school BASIC died years ago (even the last widely-used "modern" BASIC, VB, is dying). While I'm strongly in favour of teaching kids to program, I'm even more strongly opposed to using traditional BASIC for it.

I'm sorry if I sound like I'm flaming you or the people involved in the project personally- but I think this is a misguided and potentially *damaging* idea. It smacks of well-meaning adults wanting to get kids into programming the same way that they did, but assuming that BASIC is the best choice because it's what they used (and get nostalgic about).

Let me make clear again that I'm in favour of getting kids into programming... but in this day and age, there's absolutely no excuse for teaching them BASIC.

Sorry, I feel like an asshole now.