Well, I have a DELL Latitude now... don't know what that is?

This is a random picture of it:

Spoiler: show

I have no clue what I'm gonna do with this fucking thing. I could just replace everything...... if I had skills and intelligence. So random people of the internet, tell me what to do.

_________________

that looks super old.
I gave my shitty laptop to my GF who had no computer.
You could be a blessing stranger and give it to a random poor kid.

I'd add it to a cluster.

_________________

I don't trust your cluster and I hate people, anything else?

_________________

throw that shit in the trash.

Those latitude D series were the laptops we had in school until last September. If I can remember, the manufacture date was 2007. We also were running XP and didn't get Win8 until last September either. We switched the old ones for the Chromebook model latitudes. If it's in working condition I recommend selling it for a ThinkPad.

Hmmm, maybe, maybe....

_________________

Linux. You install Linux on it. The internal battery and lower power consumption of a laptop make for a perfect server. I recommend Slax, a Slackware variant that boots and runs entirely from USB/CD and is meant to not be installed. However, on such an old laptop you'll have to add GRUB or LILO to the internal harddrive. This sounds harder than it is. GRUB is the GRand Unified Boot loader and LILO is the LInux LOader, both work fine for what I'm suggesting but GRUB is the newer one having replaced LILO due to newer technologies coming out.



You can find so many tutorials on how to install and configure GRUB it's stupid.

Next get familiar with Slax. Browse the site, read up on it, then play with it once or twice. The reason I'm suggesting this is because, simply, old laptop drives are small and expensive while you could get a USB drive of comparable size and speed for pennies on the dollar. Linux is the ideal platform for "I'm probably never going to touch this computer ever again" so you can basically setup a server on it and close the lid without ever seeing the thing again.

What kind of server? Hell, find a LAMP/XAMP stack (google it) would be a lot of fun to play with, a great learning experience and a semi useful tool/platform on top of which to add other junk. If you want to get rid of ads and the like you could run a proxy like Privoxy or Dan's Guardian that can strip ads out of the HTML in real time so you don't need any kind of ad blocking on your computer/tablet. Many games offer Linux server executables so if there's a game you want to host that's a great idea.

When you do this, learn about how Linux uses swap files/partitions and make a swap file/partition on the internal disk drive of at least 8 GB. This is because that laptop probably has minimal RAM and unless you're willing to pony up the dough you're just as well off using swap. Also, learn what VNC is and how to use it to never have to actually touch that laptop again.

Goddamn fluffy. That answer was gud and so helpful I don't think I have enough cookies to give you.

_________________

Or, you could give it to me.

I was gonna install linux on it anyway and figure out what of many purposes I felt it could serve.

In any case, why complain about having a laptop? Also, showing a pic tells us fairly little, but it doesn't look like a recent Latitude. For future reference, Latitude is just a line, or series, of laptops by Dell. It's not their highest end or anything particularly special as far as I'm aware, and I forget it's target market. But yea, it's been around for years and has a lot of different models, so calling it a Latitude doesn't tell anyone a whole lot.

But yea, you could do as fluffy suggested. You could even install linux on it and use it for general purposes. Also, if you are using a liveUSB (or liveCD but a liveUSB is much faster and they're cheap enough) there's no reason to install GRUB, just change your BIOS settings to boot to USB as the first option. You can touch the hard drive or not in this setup. If you decide you want to boot from the hard drive, many common, and especially newbie, distros will handle most things for you, setup GRUB for you, etc without you having to do anything but click a button. Some will even walk you through an initial LAMP setup after installing (for instance, CrunchBang did that, which is now BusenLabs, and it used a pretty lightweight OpenBox DE which is also good for old machines).

I have a few older laptops and they can't be set to boot from USB and like n0th1n said that picture says very little. I'm guessing from the look of it that it might have that problem. If you're lucky enough that it takes a SATA drive then hell, just grab any cheap SSD and use that. Comparable pricing to decent USB drives but much higher data rates.

I used one of my old laptops as a server for a year. it hosted the official FH minecraft server. I used linux mint back then, and after 1 year, the battery had been ruined, and the laptop would no longer work unless plugged in. lol

Koku-chan is was my laptop until the roach shit caked too deeply and she refused to power on. She hosted the MineCraft server after Mint-chan and also three Terraria servers in addition to an Apache HTTPd server used as the gateway proxy to my public facing HTTPd on Kuro-chan. Mind you she ran a mutilated and almost non functional install of Windows 7 that I think I put on there back in late 2012? Poor Koku-chan is nine years old.

That's fair enough, though most in the last 10 years (and some older than that) can boot from USB, but again, we have no idea what this particular one can do.

If it's pretty old though or depending on other factors, you might not want to try for an SSD anyway, because even if it will accept it you might run into the bottleneck of the board/cpu/SATA type not being able to utilize the throughput very well (for instance, if it's just SATA I). You'll probably still get some benefit, but how worth it will it be over opting for a cheaper 7.2K laptop HDD, especially if you aren't doing a whole lot with this? Up to you I guess. I know, for instance, the ps3 sees some benefit from a 7.2K HDD, but the jump from that to an SSD most have said isn't really worth it, partially because the connection is just a SATA I anyway, and you'll run into other bottlenecks.

Granted, you typically want a "server" with just one drive to have a fairly fast, decent drive, but you have other possible limitations here and it depends on how much money you want to put into it.

You really should just try to find the specs on this to find out what you can do with it. Hell, maybe you can put in some extra memory for pretty cheap, maybe not.

Amen

Also I'd suggest learning to use ssh instead of VNC because why bother all that when you can enter commands remotely.

Also if you're using it as a server I would recommend using a version of linux that doesnt have a GUI. Ubuntu Server Or Centos Minimal Install would do.

If you do want a gui i'd recommend lubuntu.

_________________