You might be able to find a super lightweight desktop distro out there (I think Damn Small Linux can run on those specs?) or you could repurpose it as a basic server of some sort like you mentioned. Unless you wanted to invest in some cheap old ram to throw in there and maybe make it a bit faster, then I think those would be your best options.

You can install Haiku, the BeOS clone. That one runs well on less than 1 GB of RAM, and it had a new beta recently. Linux requires a minimum of 2 GB RAM these days to load 1 tab on a browser of a middle-complexity website, before it starts swapping. To really use Linux more comfortably, you’d need 4 GB, I’d say. And if you want to do 1080p video editing as well, then 8 GB. So, try Haiku.

Znc server

In addition to the good suggestions for others in this thread (like setting it up as a portable gaming device or a server of sorts), it could also be set up as a low-distraction productivity machine. I don’t know how well something like LibreOffice would run on it, but I imagine you could probably use a simpler word processor or even a plain text editor.

Worst comes to worst, I wonder what hardware support for this thing is in something like ReactOS or FreeDOS.

Print server, music box, copper scrap

Something that I considered doing with a similar laptop, was to use it as a low-end portable gaming system. I’d take a lightweight Linux distro, like the 32-bit version of Q4OS if it’s system requirements are lower than your current setup, and get it loaded with a bunch of games with low system requirements and retro emulators. Obviously, it wont be anywhere near as powerful as your main computer (if you have one) but because it’s portable, there could be some value in having a portable gaming pc (unless you have something like the Steam Deck).

Some more things I’ve used old netbooks for:

Portable pxe boot server

Audio source for mixing (think using a mixing board to do audio collage work with tape, record and digital sources)

Midi sequencer- the cheap usb to midi breakout cable works good here and you really don’t need much horsepower to sequence midi.

Tracker playback and editing

Display driver/art/digital photo collage/digital signage/whatever.

E: People will tell you that you’re better off with a sbc because it’ll save you money on power. Do your own research on this. A kill-a-watt is cheap and the power savings quickly gets murky.

So i actually have the same laptop and had a ton of fun installing arch on it over the last christmas holidays. The experience made me understand a lot, triggered my new love for arch and was a fun project overall.

I ended up having a stable CLI setup with ytfzf and mpv to watch my favorite yt channels in glorious 720p, got bluetooth working for my headset and all. Very fun experience.

Edit: i am unsure on the 32bit part, I think mine is 64, could be another generation. In any case i also have 1gb of ram

There’s lots of uses for it.

An overlay network like nebula uses “lighthouse” nodes as ways to reverse proxy to all the other hosts in the overlay. I’ve used og eeepcs as nebula lighthouses before.

“Dumb” 3d printers honestly don’t need much to bring their feature set in line with expensive ones. I still use an old netbook to control two. The screen and keyboard are great when I want to check files. Slicers and whatnot can easily run in low resource settings on those computers.

Vents allowing (and many netbooks do!), you can slide the computer into a shelf and use ssh to perform tasks on it. There’s a bunch of stuff that an always on computer with a built in battery backup can be used for at times, especially if it’s on a wired connection and you can use the wireless interface.

People will say you should be afraid of the batteries exploding or venting. I’m honestly not too concerned, but be sure to check them maybe once or twice a year.

I’m trying to utilize a couple of core 2 duo macbooks for the same purpose and it’s not going great. I have twice the cores and RAM but they’re stuck at 800 MHz, because of no batteries.

anyhow, very slow and issues with a lot of codecs I throw at them. try mpv without a DE/WM.

I’ve used old laptops as battery backed up NAS boxes.

Obviously assumes that you can install a reasonably large drive and that the battery still has some life left in it.

I don’t think it would be great for a pie hole on a gigabit connection. (if you have s slow connection then it’s good ofc)However there are use cases it’s good for. Print server, smb server, kitchen radio with Pyradio, retro gaming etc

Run some old casual games on Windows XP!

Funny you should ask: I installed Debian 32-bit on an old Asus Eee PC netbook yesterday to breathe new life into that old machine and turn it into a controller for a piece of test equipment we have at work. My company keeps old stuff like that around until space is needed in case someone needs something.

Just in case I had to modify something in the tester’s control software, I figured I’d install i3wm and Vim. It didn’t take long and I was surprised by how usable the machine ended up being. Honestly I wouldn’t have minded using it as a bone fide laptop for light-duty work on the go.

So basically keep your expectations low and install super-lightweight software, and your old Aspire could live a few extra productive years instead of going to the landfill.

Anything that requires GPU decoding will be choppy as it doesn’t support modern codex. However, assuming graphics acceleration working you should be able to browse the internet. Just make sure you have a SSD and some swap.

I tried setting up luks on one of these devices and it did work but the IO performance was slow due to the lack of CPU acceleration for modern cryptography. (That’s the theme of older devices)