In 2003, I bought an HP/Compaq Presario 2100 laptop, not the best purchase that I made. In this days of age, it is just not very useful even after I put in a solid-state hard drive and installed light-weight Linux desktop. It just could not handle the very basic functions of web surfing. But it seems such a waste to throw it out.
On the other hand, little single board computers, such as Raspberry Pi show great potential. They cost about 20 times less than what I paid for the laptop. But they do not come with a screen, keyboard/touchpad. I recently acquired an Asus Tinker Board, which has pretty impressive performance. With a fast microSD card, it can surf the web comfortably. When they are networked together (but having to settle for 100Mbps Ethernet), the laptop just serves as a terminal for the Tinker Board by running VNC. I found tigervnc to be the best. However, VNC does not pass audio. One solution is to connect the audio output to the laptop microphone input and run loopback to the speaker (pactl load-module module-loopback latency_msec=1). This arrangement proves to be quite usable even though the screen resolution is relatively low. If an external monitor is attached through HDMI, synergy can be used to share the keyboard and pointer.
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