Laptops is it worth keeping an old laptop?

I

idkmuch01

Disciple
i have an old laptop with AMD A8-7410(4core,4 thread, equivalent to 5th gen i3 mobile). currently using a raspberry Pi for PiHole,Samba share,24x7 torrent client,and a jellyfin(plex alternative) server. also runs a temporary telegram bot but that's not a crucial requirement.(passmark for pi is 800ish and laptop is 1800)

everything except jellyfin works pretty okay and i just use samba with VLC as an alternative.

my main idea rn is to just replace the pi with the laptop but an issue is power consumption and being plugged in 24x7 so the battery degradation.

is there anything else you guys would suggest as an option(i'm pretty comfortable with linux and opening up the laptop) because i wouldn't like to see it go waste.
 
I would say use the laptop for most of them. Most importantly for samba and jellyfin because the performance of Pi , not only CPU but also its I/O capabilities would be much lower than your A8. Even for PiHole, I expect the latency of DNS queries on laptop should be lower at times of high file server load, but that remains to be tested.

Power requirement, if the laptop screen is off, shouldn't be more than 20W. Instead of WiFi, connect it with wired, to save a bit of more power. 20W running all the time is less than half a unit power day - most likely you would not care about that expense for a big performance and flexibility gain.

How are you attaching hard drives to the Pi currently ? With the laptop, lots of cheap external hard drives or cheap enclosures containing internal hard drives can be connected.

If the BIOS of the laptop supports timed wake up, you can automatically suspend the laptop every night and have it wake up in the morning before you. In that case, the 24/7 stuff like torrent and telegram bots can stay on the Pi.

Battery degradation shouldn't matter because you are not using it anyway, right ? I've used the Asus EEEPC for 8 years as a home server, until it just died one day. At the end, it still had 10 minutes of battery life.
 
My old Compaq runs directly on AC power with the battery removed so maybe try that if you are worried about battery.
 
If your laptop has a way to limit charging to a certain percentage, go for it else I wouldn't recommend unless you wanna ruin the battery forever.
From my personal experience, keeping laptop plugged in at all times destroys the battery. It can shut off anytime regardless of percentage left reported when you unplug it.

If you remove battery and keep charger plugged in at all times, then it's fine but if you lose power then your DNS server will be off and you'll lose internet. If you have inverter then well and good.

I personally use pi-hole on an old and outdated android phone. Rooted and using Linux Deploy app to run a linux container. Also using apps like wake lock (for keeping CPU active when screen off) and battery limiter to keep battery at about 50% even when plugged in at all times. So I have backup even when power goes.
 
See if you can take out the laptop battery and run it just off of AC power. Use a lightweight linux distro or go full server mode instead. You can powerlimit your cpu as well. Being a laptop, most time it will sip power if you configure it correctly. Another crazy idea is, to use your rpi as a jumper and to send a wake on lan packet to your laptop if additional compute is required for video encoding or something, and then making it sleep automatically when not in use. This way you won't have to worry about keeping your laptop running all the time and won't have to mess up your existing setup. You will have to manage the switching and routing though, to ensure that your laptop is used instead of your raspberry pi when it is up. I believe, raspberry pi can do that as well, assuming you are already using pihole and have some linux knowledge, you can set up the routing to use the laptop if it is up, else use the pi. I too have a pi based setup, and I believe I have messed around with routing tables in the past for a totally different usecase, but it is possible. All the best!
 
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