3mo ago

What can I do with my super old laptop?

I had installed Debian on an Acer Aspire One Laptop. It has a 32-bit Intel Atom CPU with just 1GB of RAM. I obviously can't run it like a usual desktop anymore, it's way too slow.

I tried it to connect it to my TV with HDMI to create some sort of "Smart TV" setup, but that didn't work out because I can't even play 1080p videos on VLC with it smoothly.

So.... What now? Can I only use it for headless stuff like pihole, nextcloud, etc. now?

Is there any hope left for my unsuccessful "Smart TV" contraption?

37 comments

Honestly, ewaste center.
Not much an atom with a gig of ram can do.
- @slazer2au @maliciousonion it can play music, do IRC, Jabber, vim (neovim even, if you're lucky). there are even TUI rendering programs for Markdown and EPUB formats
  
  You can get a RaspPi instead, and after a year or two you'll have saved enough electricity to have paid for itself.
- It works fine for me
- technically there is a lot it could do, but it would not be a number 1 pick for any of it (even if you only have a $100 budget) so i agree, get rid of it.

I'm using my old netbook as Pi-hole and some home server stuff. Does its job.
- You can get an old Raspberry Pi very cheap, i have a 2b but you can go even lower. It's probably a better idea to spend a few bucks and install DietPi with Pihole on it. It uses only 5 watts, your laptop takes probably ten times more.
  
  This is a very good point, and it's one of the reasons I don't use my old laptop as an always-on server.
  
  While this is true for my another older netbook (40 W), my netbook's power consumption for running Pi-hole is ~15 W. I think it's acceptable for such operation. 5 W is tempting though.

Btw videos not working well because of absense of hardware decoding codecs, and it is make software decoding.
- Since it’s an old acer netbook with an Intel atom cpu it is highly unlikely it has any hardware decoding built in.
  
  It should as that's a basic feature. It probably is just for mpeg2 at lower resolutions

You can try turning it into a retro gaming station by installing RetroPie. Some have got it working on as little as a Pi Zero. Of course, that laptop won't be able to run the more demanding emulators.
- That probably won't work well
  
  Probably or probably not. The only way to find out is to try. I've installed RetroPie on a number of old laptops; the oldest one being a 2002 Toshiba laptop. I got to play GBA games just fine with it.

Funny you should ask: I installed Debian 32-bit on an old Asus Eee PC netbook yesterday to breathe new life into that old machine and turn it into a controller for a piece of test equipment we have at work. My company keeps old stuff like that around until space is needed in case someone needs something.
Just in case I had to modify something in the tester's control software, I figured I'd install i3wm and Vim. It didn't take long and I was surprised by how usable the machine ended up being. Honestly I wouldn't have minded using it as a bone fide laptop for light-duty work on the go.
So basically keep your expectations low and install super-lightweight software, and your old Aspire could live a few extra productive years instead of going to the landfill.

There’s lots of uses for it.
An overlay network like nebula uses “lighthouse” nodes as ways to reverse proxy to all the other hosts in the overlay. I’ve used og eeepcs as nebula lighthouses before.
“Dumb” 3d printers honestly don’t need much to bring their feature set in line with expensive ones. I still use an old netbook to control two. The screen and keyboard are great when I want to check files. Slicers and whatnot can easily run in low resource settings on those computers.
Vents allowing (and many netbooks do!), you can slide the computer into a shelf and use ssh to perform tasks on it. There’s a bunch of stuff that an always on computer with a built in battery backup can be used for at times, especially if it’s on a wired connection and you can use the wireless interface.
People will say you should be afraid of the batteries exploding or venting. I’m honestly not too concerned, but be sure to check them maybe once or twice a year.
- People will say you should be afraid of the batteries exploding or venting. I’m honestly not too concerned, but be sure to check them maybe once or twice a year.
  I'm more concerned with the power supply. Laptop power supplies often heat up a lot.
  
  I’ve never seen a smps catch fire. Is that a failure state for them?

In addition to the good suggestions for others in this thread (like setting it up as a portable gaming device or a server of sorts), it could also be set up as a low-distraction productivity machine. I don't know how well something like LibreOffice would run on it, but I imagine you could probably use a simpler word processor or even a plain text editor.
Worst comes to worst, I wonder what hardware support for this thing is in something like ReactOS or FreeDOS.

You can try with libreelec https://forum.libreelec.tv/thread/13250-testing-8-9-004-x86-acer-aspire-one/

I have a very similar spec Asus Eee PC that I use NetBSD with i3 on and it's fine for like taking notes in vim or listening to music with strawberry. It can also run Haiku fine which I might switch to on it at some point because Haiku is fun. Anyway my best use idea is just use it to explore operating systems you're curious about

Print server, music box, copper scrap

I've used old laptops as battery backed up NAS boxes.
Obviously assumes that you can install a reasonably large drive and that the battery still has some life left in it.

You can install Haiku, the BeOS clone. That one runs well on less than 1 GB of RAM, and it had a new beta recently. Linux requires a minimum of 2 GB RAM these days to load 1 tab on a browser of a middle-complexity website, before it starts swapping. To really use Linux more comfortably, you'd need 4 GB, I'd say. And if you want to do 1080p video editing as well, then 8 GB. So, try Haiku.

Run some old casual games on Windows XP!

So i actually have the same laptop and had a ton of fun installing arch on it over the last christmas holidays. The experience made me understand a lot, triggered my new love for arch and was a fun project overall.
I ended up having a stable CLI setup with ytfzf and mpv to watch my favorite yt channels in glorious 720p, got bluetooth working for my headset and all. Very fun experience.
Edit: i am unsure on the 32bit part, I think mine is 64, could be another generation. In any case i also have 1gb of ram

Some more things I’ve used old netbooks for:
Portable pxe boot server
Audio source for mixing (think using a mixing board to do audio collage work with tape, record and digital sources)
Midi sequencer- the cheap usb to midi breakout cable works good here and you really don’t need much horsepower to sequence midi.
Tracker playback and editing
Display driver/art/digital photo collage/digital signage/whatever.
E: People will tell you that you’re better off with a sbc because it’ll save you money on power. Do your own research on this. A kill-a-watt is cheap and the power savings quickly gets murky.

Znc server

Something that I considered doing with a similar laptop, was to use it as a low-end portable gaming system. I'd take a lightweight Linux distro, like the 32-bit version of Q4OS if it's system requirements are lower than your current setup, and get it loaded with a bunch of games with low system requirements and retro emulators. Obviously, it wont be anywhere near as powerful as your main computer (if you have one) but because it's portable, there could be some value in having a portable gaming pc (unless you have something like the Steam Deck).

Anything that requires GPU decoding will be choppy as it doesn't support modern codex. However, assuming graphics acceleration working you should be able to browse the internet. Just make sure you have a SSD and some swap.
I tried setting up luks on one of these devices and it did work but the IO performance was slow due to the lack of CPU acceleration for modern cryptography. (That's the theme of older devices)

I don't think it would be great for a pie hole on a gigabit connection. (if you have s slow connection then it's good ofc)However there are use cases it's good for. Print server, smb server, kitchen radio with Pyradio, retro gaming etc

I'm trying to utilize a couple of core 2 duo macbooks for the same purpose and it's not going great. I have twice the cores and RAM but they're stuck at 800 MHz, because of no batteries.
anyhow, very slow and issues with a lot of codecs I throw at them. try mpv without a DE/WM.
- The c2d MacBooks ought to have relatively cheap and available batteries. Why not put one in?

It'll run Johnny Castaway just fine.

You might be able to find a super lightweight desktop distro out there (I think Damn Small Linux can run on those specs?) or you could repurpose it as a basic server of some sort like you mentioned. Unless you wanted to invest in some cheap old ram to throw in there and maybe make it a bit faster, then I think those would be your best options.

It could be a music server with mpd -- then you could configure it to stream over http to other devices. Or you could configure it as a client for a music server you keep somewhere else.

37 comments