With our lives are becoming increasingly centered on technology and people upgrading and buying new devices every year to keep up with the bleeding edge. This causes a significant overflow of gadgets in our lives, with more than capable devices sitting idle in your drawers and cupboards. All these devices can come in handy in many ways and can help you out in a lot of day-to-day cases like home security and other daily chores. This will relieve you from questioning your life decisions and money management abilities.
1. Repurpose Into A Router And Modem
The router/modem combo that everyone uses and your local ISP provides is easy to use but lacks a lot of hardware grunt. This is why we often see network fallout even when the internet is working, and it only happens when the router is overwhelmed by the number of connections or too much traffic to handle. To beat this, we can use an old pc or laptop as a router/modem instead of an all-in-one router.
2. House Surveillance
We all have old smartphones lying around in our houses which have no purpose other than sitting in drawers and shelves. These devices can be repurposed to work as surveillance cams which transmit video data over the network of your house to a cloud platform that you can access remotely.
3. Nas/media Server
Ever wondered if you could stream directly from your PC to your living room TV? Well, there are way around to achieve this. If you simply have an old pc or laptop lying around, you can repurpose it to work as a media server over the network which can stream to any device in your house connected to your home network.
4. Personal Music Streaming Service
Tired of listening to ads and bad audio quality on your music streaming platform, we can beat that by using a PLEX server to stream audio over the network, and you can directly access this anywhere with your internet network. This will remove all the ads that were bothering your listening and stream at the highest bitrate possible for the best audio quality.
5. Old Laptop Is Your Second Monitor
If you have an old and sluggish laptop that won’t be on toes with the current software and fast-moving technology. Even though the hardware is old, there can be some things that are still good enough to be used, like the display. Anyone can reroute the display with a MUX switch to work as a secondary display to your main computer. This will increase your productivity and give you more screen real estate.
6. Use As A Home Theatre PC
We all know how good smart TVs these days are they start off as buttery smooth but with time, become sluggish. This happens because companies fit them with mediocre processors to handle applications, and as you load in more, it hinders their performance. If you use your PC for all these applications instead of the inbuilt ones, it will never get sluggish, and you will have a fully functioning web browser.
7. Peer Network
You can turn your PC into an open-source peer network that will connect to a network with hundreds of thousands of other computers which pool their resources to do complex tasks to help the community. These tasks are carried out by many groups like medical professionals and other social groups to help the community.
8. Crypto Mining Rig
Every one of us wants to make money while we sleep, well this is possible. You can pool the resources of your computers and use them to mine cryptocurrencies and store them in a physical or hash wallet. This might not be very much profitable with older and slower hardware but it will for sure make some small profits for a lunch or two in a week.
9. Salvaging Old Components
New hardware and technology come out every year, but with a solid and vocal community, the inter-compatibility of parts remains very quite strong. This keeps a lot of hardware alive even after being dated. Anyone can use this to use parts from their old computer like RAM, SSD, HDD, GPU, and other parts, whichever are compatible and helpful.
10. Lending Or Selling The Old Computer
Sometimes things are old and can’t be repurposed into doing something heavy and taxing. For these machines ,you can always lend them to your young cousin or nephew for them to get some idea and make them used to using computers and technology be their extension.
