10 replies to this topic

[k_nitin_r]

If you've still got the laptop with you, you could do a couple of less-destructive things with it too. I'd run a web server on it and have it run my personal website. I run WordPress on my personal website and even an old laptop should be able to handle the load from a small number of concurrent users. WordPress may be CPU intensive, but if you do enable caching, it can run on older hardware too.

You can also use old laptops for hooking up webcams and using them instead of CCTV cameras. You can write up a script to record video footage to a file and periodically upload the footage to an FTP server. If you are less concerned about security, you can simply take photographs and send them across periodically instead of a video - you may not catch a burglar in the act, but you would know that something is wrong out there.

If you can hook up a couple of extra network cards to the laptop (either PCMCIA expansion cards or USB), you can turn the laptop into a router too.

If you've got a computer that you would like multiple users working on together, an old laptop can be used as a terminal for connecting to the other computer. You can hook up the old laptop to the network, run a terminal server, telnet, or SSH server on the other computer and connect to the computer via the laptop. All of the execution would be through the other computer and the old laptop would only be sending input and receiving output. Think of it as a wireless keyboard and monitor. You can also do this with old smartphones. If you have an iMate Jasjar, you can connect to a computer and you have a QWERTY keyboard on the phone to be able to do stuff that you would normally do from the computer.

You can also use old computers to share hard disk drives across a network. You can hook up your USB external hard disk to it, plug it into the network, and access the root of the drive as an administrative share or create a shared folder on the USB drive.

Using an old laptop with a webcam for security, as a router, or for sharing external hard disk drives may seem like a patchy solution because if you were to get dedicated devices to perform the same function, they would be in a much more compact form and would use much less electricity. However, using an old laptop is a cost-saving measure as buying a network CCTV camera would cost you much more than a simple webcam, a router that provides all of the functionality as the old laptop would cost much much more than a simple network card, and getting a cheap external USB hard disk drive (the large ones with an external AC power supply adapter) can give you more bang for the buck than a passport USB external hard disk drive or even an external hard disk drive with a network interface.