Thinkpads are my laptops of choice (writing this on my X240) but I'd never use any any laptop as a home server: if something breaks there are no spare parts, no

Thinkpads are my laptops of choice (writing this on my X240) but I'd never use any any laptop as a home server: if something breaks there are no spare parts, no PSUs to repair or cards to add for more functionality (I simply don't trust USB for disks) or swap etc, and the whole machine is not intended to be kept on 24/7 (think about the fan wearing, not just the CPU). I could only understand if one need to serve files in a emergency situation, and I did exactly that many years ago when we had to service a server which died without notice at one workplace where downtimes were not an option, so I copied all their documents on my mini laptop -Fujitsu Siemens Lifebook P7010, a netbook sized marvel well before the word netbook was invented- which became the file server with Samba for almost two full days until the server came up and I restored their modified files back. Building a home server from scratch isn't that hard nor expensive; I made mine around a Atom Mini-ITX board that despite only 4GB RAM and fairly weak CPU does its job managing two ZFS mirrors under XigmaNAS (.org). On the ARM side, there are some other interesting products such as the Rock Pi 4 and associated Penta SATA Hat at radxa.com. I hope also someone will one day take on development of the Helios 64 platform at kobol.io. They ceased development last summer but the hardware, albeit not yet stable, was very promising. Old laptops still have uses for media playing, test machines, or lab instrumentation though; a decent audio card can turn any old laptop into a low frequency spectrum analyzer through Jaaa (http://kokkinizita.linuxaudio.org/linuxaudio/ http://kokkinizita.linuxaudio.org/linuxaudio/), etc.