I used an extremely weak Acer netbook — the kind that shipped with Windows XP and still slowed down — as an Ubuntu home server and it worked surprisingly well.

I used an extremely weak Acer netbook — the kind that shipped with Windows XP and still slowed down — as an Ubuntu home server and it worked surprisingly well. Apt didn’t mind the small, slow hard drive and everything seemed to actually run relatively fast. (I guess it just really hated drawing a GUI?) It was mostly a printer server, serving CUPS for a USB-only printer, but it did its job well for years and years. Plus the battery had an upside of serving as a UPS, heh. But I did learn the hard way that they’re really not meant to run like that: the fan became increasingly noisy until it sounded like a car ignition, and the heat (when the fan was working fine!) managed to slowly wear out the membrane keyboard, killing more and more keys, making in-person debugging kinda difficult. But it was really cool. And I still have its more performant cousin Asus netbook somewhere!