Once you shove your slow, beat-up laptop aside for a newer model, you need to decide what to do with the older machine. While it’s tempting to take a baseball bat to the laptop, as the guys in the movie The Office did to the copier, there are plenty of useful functions for your digital ex.
Gizmodo suggests five potential uses for the old machine, issuing a step-by-step guide for each of its ideas:
*Turn it into a home server. Back up your files to the old machine and stream files without having to waste your new computer’s precious hard drive space.
*Transform it into a digital photo frame. Rejigger your screen into a frame, hang it on your wall, keep it plugged in and let your Harry Potter-like picture frame cycle through slide shows.
*Make it a wireless bridge. Extend the range of your wireless router by sticking the computer in a dead zone.
*Transform it into an external hard drive. Rip out the hard drive, insert it into a casing you can find online for cheap, and voila — extra storage space.
*Use it as a second monitor. Play a computer game while watching a movie, or IM while writing without having to click back and forth between applications.
How many laptops have you gone through in your life, and what have you done with the old ones?
Five Things to Do with Your Old Laptop [Gizmodo]
I use my old laptop as a remote control for my jerry-rigged media server beside my HDTV via WinVNC . . . works great.
I have one old laptop sitting next to my chair in the living room. If I need to look something up (something on a TV show, or movie, or a walkthrough of a game I am stuck on)) I have something right there. It’s not fast, but gets the job done. Ubuntu 9.something is what is currently on it. Another laptop was in the garage, but the drive finally died. Now there is an old desktop out there, and an old LCD monitor. I use it for when I am working on one of my cars, and need to look something up. The newer laptops end up as kids toys, since they are a bit faster, and can run what the kids want to run. (mostly flash games)
Alomost everyone that comes over to my house and goes to the garage, asks why I have a computer in the garage. It’s either that, or throw it away. Seemed wasteful to me. My way of recycling computers that still work.