I need ideas.
What's the best use for several old, moderately crap laptops (<= 4GB RAM) I have lying around? I'm using one as a minecraft server because 3GB ram is enough and the Pi isn't, but past that, I'm pretty stuck. They all work, mostly, have CD drives and mostly free hard drives.

Home media server?

Donate them away

All good suggestions. Keep em coming :)
I've thought about using them as an ftp/media server just because I have so many separate devices that my files are spread out everywhere haphazardly, but I don't know of a good (efficient, secure, etc) way to do it. I also have thought about using them for VPNs to home, or testing hacky stuff (since they're old), but I honestly don't know much about that either. TL;DR I wanna learn stuff

give it to me

@edwrodrig they're not worth the money it would cost to send them to Chile. Sorry.

@chadd17 😢

@chadd17 I once gutted an ancient laptop more than a decade ago and fitted it into a DIY wooden frame to be a digital photo frame. It runs windows98 and uses RSS to cycle through family pictures that we upload to a server at home. Still operational.

But now there are more energy efficient devices that can do those stuff and more. The pine64, Rpi3, etc. are almost as powerful, if not more, than old laptops and can act as media server, file server, VPN server and the likes using only a fraction of electricity that old laptops consume. You mentioned you have a pi, you don't need a powerful device for a file server

You could setup a mini NAS for all your storage needs. You could store Backups and what not.

torrent box.
the other options are to setup a webcam to see who is outside, or a cheap openvpn server

You could
* Build a usb device server
* Webserver
* NAS
* Automatic disc ripper + media server
* Gitea/Gogs/GitLab server
* CI Server
* Webcaching
* IRC Server
* DNS/DHCP/NTP server
* pfsense (very difficult without two nics)
* Build a beamer out of the display and an OHP
* Build a Yacy search server
* Build a printer like drawer with legotechnic and the laptop as controller
* Build a flight antenna/weather station
* Serial console

All that i can think of right now.

@vortexman100 This. Perfect comment. Idk what half of it is, and that fascinates me. Awesome.

@chadd17 This brightens my day! I was helpful to someone :)

@chadd17 Also, i just saw that you listed "arduino", so this might be something for you. A laser transmitter system vetween the two laptops. You basically take the laser diode and let it blink serial information. On the other side build a light sensor with takes the information and processes it. You could send a file over it. Or music.

Try building some kind of distributed system, maybe even just for serving different websites under one address.
One is a load balancer, two or three are the redundant production instances, one is a firewall (if it one of them has multiple LAN ports, use that one), one testing and one Dev.
I never done anything like this but I think it would be cool to try some DevOps stuff, learn about networking and general nerding.

@vringar @chadd17 Combine this with my comment. For example install an IRC server with web interface and make it accessible over the webserver (reverse proxy). I recommend caddy server for all web hosting and proxying.

@chadd17 give to me?

Super liking the idea of friggin' lasers.
That's exactly what my room needs - more futuristic techno junk :)
No clue about distributed computing.

Make a cluster. If they are intel processors, write some software using INTEL MPI to make the cpu’s work together in the local network.

Leaving this here for research purposes

@qlasico trolling for good ideas?

@b-atanasov Intel MPI, you say?🤔

Depends on age, generation, type of intel cpu?

@b-atanasov i know it works on any i-series processor, since 4th generation. I don’t know about previous ones though. It might. Anyways, just an idea I’m throwing in here. The only thing I’ve used it for is to communicate a cluster of home laptops to help my mom with some fluid dynamics calculations she was doing on an old garbage machine at work.

Wipe, install chrome OS, and donate then to your local primary school! (can you tell I work in a primary school?)

@b-atanasov Awesome stuff, sir. Thanks for the info :)