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Ask HN: What should I do with my old laptop in 2026?

Setup Proxmox and Tailscale on it so you can create VMs or containers as you need and access them from anywhere.

Setup Coolify on it. With Coolify and Cloudflare Tunnels you can self host your personal projects even behind CG-NAT.

a day agoolivierroy

Give it to someone you know who needs a laptop.

2 days agoiwanttocomment

Hang on to it if it still works, and you've got a power supply. There's going to be disruptions to global trade one way or the other (Trump does insane things, OR Xi invades Taiwan) that will completely mess up the availability of CPUs, and indeed, most electronics. You may be able to sell it for a profit, or be in the top percent of computer owners in 3 years.

2 days agobediger4000

BTW It's a 2019 Dell Inspiron with ~2.8 GHz processor speed and 24 GB memory. It's pretty slow by today's standards. Does your recommendation still hold?

a day agonanfinitum

That's a very capable machine. It doesn't really matter if it's slow by today's standards. It's fine, particularly if it's not running Windows. I recently bought a couple of machines that were older and less capable than that, but were plenty good enough for what I wanted them for.

Just because a machine isn't up to the latest specs doesn't mean it's not good, or that there isn't a market for it.

a day agoJohnFen

Put linux mint on it. You’ll be amazed how well it runs.