Today let me show you 10 different uses for old gaming laptops that I am pretty sure will help you put that old-timer to good use.
I have on many occasions here on Yantraas told you what to do with old pc parts. To be honest with you, I really enjoy writing these reuse, recycle, eco-friendly type articles.
It makes me feel I am contributing towards something good in a very small yet significant way. Because when the electronics we use aren’t disposed of properly, they pose a huge risk to the environment.
It is always better to find ways to reuse, recycle old electronics. And with a little research, you can find some really innovative ways to do so.
So, you can gauge my excitement when I received a mail from one of you guys asking me to suggest to her some innovative uses for old gaming laptops.
Now there are so many ways in which you reuse an old PC and when you also get the processing power of a gaming laptop, I think you can do a lot of things with it.
Here are a few more articles, in addition to what I was referring to, that I think you will love.
- Top 8 creative ways of reusing old hard drives.
- 6 innovative uses of old PC memory.
- How long do pc parts last?
- 10 hardwareless use of raspberry pi
- Do SSDs improve an old PC’s gaming performance?
Let’s go ahead and discuss each of those things.
Gift your Old Gaming Laptop
Our world is now ruled by computers. You shouldn’t have any doubts about it now.
While some of us are lucky to be able to keep our pace with the movement of technology, there are many who can’t.
So, I know I said I will suggest some innovative uses of old gaming laptops and I will.
But I can’t think of a better use of an old gaming laptop than to give it to somebody who needs it.
It can be anybody, maybe your siblings, someone who is about to join college, someone who never had the fortune to play PC games.
You can even donate it to a school, an orphanage, or some kind of charitable organization that can make use of it in their daily proceedings.
The whole point of it all is to ensure that the gaming laptop goes into the hands of someone who will appreciate it and make use of it in a good way.
Sell the Old Gaming Laptop
Now, of course, the next best option should you not choose to go ahead with the first one is selling it.
Gaming laptops are expensive pieces of tech. They are at least twice if not more than what your normal everyday laptop costs.
And gaming laptops for their superior hardware tend to be competitive in terms of performance for a much longer time than your average everyday use laptops.
So, even if your gaming laptop is old I am pretty sure it will match if not surpass some laptops of today.
And as such, you can sell them for a good price. And if the laptop is operational and doesn’t put forth a lot of issues while using it, you can sell it for a good price.
There are many online platforms that you can try. Reddit’s r/hardwareswap is a great place. The community is very active and nicely moderated and you should be able to get some good leads there.
Facebook marketplace is another good option. You can also try eBay, craigslist or IT connected.
Just be a little cautious when using online portals to trade expensive pc hardware. While the chances of scams are getting reduced as most of these sites offer buyer and seller protection but you can never be too careful.
Just maintain a certain level of skepticism and cautiousness and you should be fine.
Upgrade It
The way gaming laptops are designed the manufacturers always make it relatively easy to upgrade the hardware in them.
The reasoning is simple and pretty obvious. Gaming laptops are going to be subjected to the most intense of tasks that come in the form of gaming, graphic processing, video editing, etc.
Therefore, customers demand laptops that are upgradeable to be competitive in the ever-expanding niche.
The manufacturers bowing to the demand usually produce laptops that offer easy upgradeability.
The most easily upgradeable parts of a gaming PC are its RAM and SSDs.
I have created a whole article that tells you how to systematically upgrade a PC that I recommend you read.
But yeah, go through your laptop’s user manual to see what parts of your gaming laptop can you upgrade.
With the right parts, you can upgrade your old gaming laptop to last a couple more years or maybe more.
Create A Wall Mounted Utility PC
Okay, I have beaten around the bush quite a lot till now. Let me now actually suggest some creative uses for your old gaming laptops in this and subsequent sections.
With some simple adjustments, you can create a utility PC out of your old gaming laptop. You can with some DIY mount it to a wall and turn it into a static, single-purpose machine.
The dedicated utility PC can be a subject of many tasks like a digital photo frame, a PC to mark calendars, see recipes or play videos.
Doing a simple google search will give you plenty of tutorials teaching you how to create a one-off utility pc using your old gaming laptop.
Create A Simple Projector
Have you ever found yourselves watching something on your laptop and wished it was bigger? 😛
Well, with a spare old gaming laptop you can actually create a mini projector for yourself.
While of course, the laptop projector won’t be as potent as a dedicated projector and I don’t recommend creating it for watching movies. Especially, so if the video quality is important for you.
But if you are not a pixel freak and want to create something that you can use for some light video watching, for presentations, or something similar I really recommend creating a mini projector using your old gaming laptop.
Oh, and by the way did I mention it won’t cost you more than $5 to do it?
No? Well, now you know.
Create A Media Centre With An Old Gaming Laptop
In one of my previous articles, I taught you guys how you can create a plex server using raspberry pi.
While that is a very effective way to serve media files through a network across your devices, something as powerful as an old gaming laptop is just too powerful for it.
The perfect way to use an old gaming laptop is as a media center.
And what’s even cooler is that creating a media center using an old laptop isn’t difficult at all.
Add to that the simple fact that a laptop is a slim unit that you can easily hide behind your flat screen by taking apart parts of it that you won’t need.
So how to do this. Conversion of a laptop into a media center happens with the help of a media center application called XBMC.
With the help of XBMC, you will be able to organize your movies, your favorite TV shows, and similar media in a user-friendly way that you can browse using a remote control.
Once you have installed XBMC on your old laptop and hooked it up to your TV, from the comforts of your couch you can enjoy your ripped movies, TV shows, and even stream media from your favorite streaming services like Netflix, Hulu, Spotify, etc.
People create a dedicated media center build and old laptops don’t stand a chance in front of it, but if your old laptop is a gaming laptop the performance will become competitive depending upon your gaming laptop’s configuration.
Network Attached Storage
Probably one of the most fruitful uses of an old computer is to create a NAS box out of it.
But yeah creating a Network Attached System out of something as powerful as an old gaming pc is overkill in my opinion.
Nevertheless, if you don’t use the old gaming laptop for anything else and have a lot of files that need proper organization, creating a NAS box out of your old gaming laptop can be very rewarding.
Creating A NAS out of a PC is simple enough. To set it up you will need an application like FREENAS.
With FreeNAS installed in the system, you will be able to create a centralized space where you can store, organize and share files with different devices on the network.
Users recommend having at least 8 GB RAM and a 64-bit chip to run FreeNAS properly. This shouldn’t be a problem given we are talking about old gaming laptops here.
Make A Gaming Server Out Of your Old Gaming Lap
What better way to use an old gaming laptop but to deploy it in a purpose it was born to fulfill, gaming.
So, if you have bought a new gaming laptop or have built one for yourselves, you can use your old gaming laptop to help aid you in your multiplayer gaming adventures.
Creating a gaming server using your old gaming laptop is one of the aptest uses for it.
Usually, it is the game developer or manufacturer that manages the host that you connect to in order to play with or against other players.
And as such you do not have a lot of control over the different parameters.
I see players complaining about issues faced by players that are separated over large geographical locations among other things.
If you can create your own dedicated gaming server with your old gaming laptop, you can enjoy your favorite multiplayer games with your friends the way you want.
An additional benefit that many seem to overlook is when you create your own server you learn so much about networking.
With a custom gaming server, you will have much more stability, greater performance and you will also know the limits of your server and what happens when you stretch it.
As I said, the learning part out of a project like this should never be overlooked.
People who try to create a gaming server out of an old PC need to check whether their system can run games like cs go, rocket league, etc.
But given that you already have a gaming PC, you can use this laptop as a very worthy gaming server.
External Monitor
Gaming laptops almost always have excellent screens. So, if you know that the compute units of your laptop don’t work anymore, you can with some caution detach its screen and use it as an external monitor.
The uses for this new screen can be many like using as a secondary monitor for your main PC. Or if you know how to work with raspberry pi, you can hook up the screen to the raspberry pi and build a sibling for your main PC.
Talking about raspberry pi, one of its most popular uses is as a retro gaming machine.
So, if you are like me and like classic games of old, the laptop’s screen can be perfect to emulate your favorite games.
Also, if you operate raspberry pi in headless mode, a simple screen like this can be used for any initial adjustment instead of hooking your main screen to it.
The use cases can be so many. It will take some DIY and may a few extra cheap components but yeah you can basically hook the screen to any device that needs a screen.
Salvage the Parts
Given the fundamental fact that gaming laptops are expensive, if your laptop is dead beyond reasonable repair, you can always harness parts out of it.
The parts that you can take out, use, or even sell are hard drives, laptop screens, SSDs, and memory.
Hard drives especially can be particularly useful for obvious reasons and with the help of a nice enclosure, you can turn it into an external hard drive.
If your laptop is too old, chances are you won’t be able to use its RAM on any modern laptop. But you can try selling them on platforms like eBay, Facebook marketplace, Reddit, etc.
There are people who are looking for relatively older PC parts to upgrade their old systems all the time, and maybe you will be able to sell it.
If for some reason you can’t here are two articles that I have already created that teach you,
Don’t Throw Your Gaming Laptop In the Trash
I am pretty sure you are well aware of the impact undisposed plastic and silicon-based materials can have on the environment.
Now we all understand that the kind of lifestyle that we as people have adopted, we cannot go to a place where we can avoid using electronics.
That being said being responsible for what we consume and what we put out into the environment is definitely in our hands.
And one of the most effective ways in which we can address the negative impact that e-wastes potentially causes is by reusing what we can.
You see old laptops, old RAM, old hard drives can with some effort and creativity can be reused in many obvious or sometimes indirect ways.
As I said in a previous part of this article that I make it a point to share these types of articles here on Yantraas.
I particularly enjoy making people aware of how they can harmonize their lifestyle with technology in such a way that it isn’t detrimental to the environment.
In that direction, I have already created a few articles that I will link below and I hope you will give them a read.
Because when it comes to reusing and recycling, the not-so-apparent ways open doors to creative expression.
Find out what I mean with that visiting these articles.
I hope you enjoyed reading this article as much as I enjoyed creating it.
The article found expression because one of my readers emailed me to write about it.
I love responding to requests that I know for a fact will benefit a lot of people.
So, if you have any such queries, comments, or feedback regarding anything that you consume here, do let me know in the comments below.
And for that matter, if you know any other uses for old gaming laptops, apart from what we have discussed here share it below also.
Who knows maybe I will feature it and you in the article.
Subscribe to the blog take great care of yourselves and I will see you in the next one!
Tada!
