EDIT: i had an rpi it died from esd i think
EDIT2: this is also my work machine and i sleep to the sound of the fans
Doing something scrappy with an old laptop is cool. Hey, built in UPS if the battery still works!
Doing something powerful and reliable with server class hardware is also very cool.
If it is meeting your needs, I’m happy for you.
Sorry to tell you I never had a battery
BRB just making a backup
Poverty computing takes more balls. Like yeah, you got a nice Plex server and you can play Skyrim at max setting because you can afford a big NAS and a nice graphic card - no skills needed. I’m spending two hours trying to get the Sims to work on a fifteen year old laptop that I don’t think can even run a DE or running Puppy Linux off USB while waiting to afford a new hard drive.
Missing a Raspberry PI 4 setup which hosts a print server, an RTP server with two surveillance webcams and no password, and also seeds a terabyte of torrents over the local flower shop’s unencrypted WiFi.
Racks? None
Screens? Attached
Fans? Full blast
Oh yeah, it’s server laptop time
Wow look at Mr FancyPants over there, your server has a screen, I just got something (RPi) the size of a matchbox! /s
Less power is more power!
I mean you aren’t going to host 100tb of porn in that laptop…yet 😘
Don’t even have 256G installed in that thing
I just have an old laptop with a tui screen saver on it to prevent burn
also, the ssd doesn’t work with linux so i have to put the os on a usb stick
Try booting your installer without UEFI - I have an old x99 WS IPMI board I spun up with NixOS and has so many issues using the EFI / UEFI installer.
Admittedly that thing pulls 60w at idle, so promptly turned it off 😅
nah, it’s not uefi. linux straight up doesn’t even see the drive when it’s in the pc. according to archwiki, all laptops in its series work perfectly with Linux except for this one. the SSD does work externally in an enclosure though, so I’m using it for storage.
Ahh man that’s a pain, my old notebook has no sata and only 32gb of emmc (which I’m tempted to remove and add a larger chip), but it’s only being used for my 3D printer so it’s not really a pressing need yet.
Btw you can set it up to turn the screen off without sending it to sleep. I use a screen lock to do this, but other things probably work too
Just because you can afford to lose your weird niche fetish porn doesn’t mean I can afford to lose my calendar and contacts
Imagine asking “why?” instead of “why not?”
Money? Noise? Power consumption?
Heavy-duty applications? Lots of devices in the home? Reliance on PoE? There are plenty of reasons to use big equipment, it’s not just for show.
I couldn’t run multiple game servers off of a laptop the way I do on my spare Ryzen 9 5900X. I also have it transcoding media and it has 30tb of storage, of which I’m currently using over 2/3s for media/steam cache.
I also have a 24 port switch because I have a whole family here each with their own PCs, consoles, etc… I host the odd LAN as well and it wasn’t really any cheaper to go smaller for when I don’t need all 24, so I just popped it off. I also need two APs on different channels just to accommodate all the wireless devices + IoT shit.
To be completely fair, it’s hard to overstate the durability of an old Thinkpad. They’re so ubiquitous, Linux compatibility is almost guaranteed. Then, after the battery goes, attach it to a UPC and ride that setup for another decade at least.
this is also my work machine and i sleep to the fans whirring
Some people actually have the services they host get used by other people.
Let’s be real though, What’s someone doing with three oscilloscopes
An experiment because someone once thought “you know what would be better than two oscilloscopes?”
Playing Doom.
