I took an old 2007 ultrabook and made it into a media and retro game station for the break room at work. It’s a 32-bit Core Duo - not even Core 2 - but that’s enough to play H264 video and basically any emulated game through the 4th console generation (SNES/Genesis) and some early parts of the 5th (e.g. some of the 2D PS1 games). Been a great hit at work.

So there was this fiction book series I read about cybersecurity. Old tech is the ultimate security in the story, it’s creepy how parallel it is to today. You would have to take some extra steps to make it secure but you would be out of the radar of the majority.

The whole premises is like how Macintosh was considered being secure was because nobody wanted to waste their finding vulnerabilities to it since it was such a small batch of users. Of course that changed. But you can use what you have as dedicated forks for certain functions as a layer of security. W11 is going to likely have more vulnerabilities compared to W7 since no one really uses it anymore. Or even LTSB/LTSC forks. You would have to be on a list if you’re getting attention.

Dedicated single purpose machines. It’s nice to have a device that doesn’t include all of the usual distractions. For example, I have an old iPhone that only has the PBS Kids app and some pre-approved shows downloaded. Everything else has been removed, so I feel a little bit better about hanging it to a child on road trips and the like. Another old laptop has been covered into a Step Mania machine.

I think old motherboards make nice wall decorations. Just hang them like a picture. Even non-technical people are fascinated by raw silicone. And people get a kick out of removing/installing RAM sticks and CPUs.

Linux Mint XFCE and give them to people in need.

The Android phone might be the most useful, load it up with music or movies and use it as a portable media player or for powering an home stereo (assuming SD card slot and headphone jack based on the age). With the camera you could use it as an IP camera for a security camera. Also depending on the processing power, connecting a Bluetooth controller if you have a PlayStation or Xbox controller that supports it, and loading up some SNES and Gameboy games. I know PS3/4 and some Xbox One controllers support Bluetooth, not sure about newer.

If your home server is enough for your needs, then you can use old laptops for thin clients (tv box, audio streaming client, arcade emulation pc, that kind of thing).

You can also divide and conquer the work of your home server, a download and file manager client, a steam-cache server, a cheap backup nas, CCTV server, home-automation stuff.

This is just a few ideas from the top of my head, but the best use I got from old working laptops were to modernize them (new battery, ssd, Linux) and gift them to people who needed them (students, elderly, etc)

It’s tough, because we’re about to enter an era where having old, still working tech might actually be a functional boon for a lot of people as the costs of new fabrication explode and the cost of a personal computer becomes nigh inaccessible.

I do think there’s a limit, however. I have several older devices that while they have 64 bit CPUs, they have 32-bit bootloaders. Thankfully, Ventoy seems to work well with them still in terms of being able to boot and function properly. But I do wonder if, considering the used market we may soon be sitting in, if all the effort to drop 32-bit support from modern Linux distributions could end up making that market more difficult when there’s still some decent-ish devices from that era to do some minor tasks, even if they produce a higher power draw.

To me, the overall power draw is a bigger deal than how old the processor is. If it’s an old processor but has a streamlined design that isn’t a power hog, then it’s still worthwhile. If it sucks up a lot of energy just to do some basic stuff, then it’s probably more costly than it is worth in terms of energy consumption. If you can’t find any more modern solutions, sure, use the power hog, but I do think the real future of computing is in low-power, high-latency devices as we head into a more fractured future.

Anyway, as for practical use, I don’t have a beefy server to run a lot of major services on or to have multiple virtual machines all running at once. I just use actual old machines for headless servers for small services that can fit on and not be overwhelming to these devices. I have a whole stack of self-hosted services on what amounts to (mostly) a bunch of second-hand equipment. Six server boxes, around 25-ish services with about 20-ish of them docker containers.

If you already have one home server, you need two more to make a redundant cluster.

And then you need another set of three to live at a family member or friend’s house to receive your off-site backups.

When I still had a static IP I used my oldest laptop as a home server. While its battery life was abysmal and it needed to stay plugged in, it was a sort of poor man’s surge protection, and also a micro blackout (which we have several times a year usually during storms) protection.

I stuck a 1TB hard drive in it, but RAM and CPU were as good as you’d expect from a 2008 model.

I think people vastly overestimate the resources needed to serve a website, even when it serves media.

PS: I once borrowed a Watt meter to measure consumption, and it was almost the same as a raspberry pi with a spinning hd attached. Not much.

Donate?

Plenty of homeless folks don’t have access to tech. There are families escaping abusive partners who could use them.

Retrogaming machines. Emulators for consoles before the 3D era can run on pretty much a dead hedgehog; you can have hundreds of great games to choose from even on an old system. NES, Super Nintendo, and Genesis are great places to start.

I played this game where the people in this apartment building would cobble together video call systems they would use as peep-holes and doorbells with two-way communication. Looked like they were built with old phones, TVs, and other devices they could get their hands on.

I’ve always wanted to build one. I’ll see if I can find the game again.

EDIT: The game was Observer. This is the best screenshot of a couple of them I could find in a couple minutes:

I used an old phone as an IP camera for years. Worked great until it literally died.

Got a home server running on a Macbook from the Obama administration.

My home is very home assistanty, but I haven’t found a good doorbell chime. There are plenty of buttons that work as buzzer.

I’ve got one of them buttons by the front door. Sends regular notifications to me and the Mrs, and there’s one old Android phone in the kitchen whose only job is going ding-dong loudly.