this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2025
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I dislike posts like this. Technology moves quickly. PIs are great for hobby electronics where you need a little computer. Want a cheap computer to run a few things 24/7 and know what you're doing? Pi it is. You don't need to run containers on a pi because you have the skills to install the dependencies manually. They cost pennies to run 24/7.
I think of pis as beefed-up calculators. I have made lots of money using a pi zero running code I needed to run 24/7. Code I developed myself.
Having an old laptop with outdated parts taking up lots of space, weighing a lot, and having components like fans, keyboard, and mousepad most-likely soon dying and needing replacing is an additional concern you don't want.
Someone below saying use an old laptop if you're living with parents and don't pay the electricity bill is a bit lame. Do your part for the world. Someone will be paying for it.
Ultimately, use what you want but if you're just starting with servers, use a virtual machine on your computer and log in to it. You can dick about with it as much as you want, and reset back to a working state in seconds.
Laptops don't even use that much power. You guys are really not into home labbing or as good with tech as you think you are lol. Lots of people run older real servers and desktops as home servers. They use way more power than laptops. Raspberry Pis sound good but use progressively more power in each generation, and still struggle to compete with mini PCs and even older laptops in performance. They also never had good performance per watt. In performance per watt basically nothing beats a Mac Mini, though other mini PCs are also good. Laptops aren't bad in energy efficiency either. They are literally designed to run on battery so have as little idle draw as possible. They would be comparable to a mini PC if you turn off the display.
Edit: Modern RPis apparently use 25W, which is firmly in the territory of what a laptop would use when not running the screen or charging the battery.
Jesus 25W is about what a miniPC would consume at a constant 30-50% load!
Rpi uses 25watts? My old acer 6th gen laptop has a 15watt TDP and remains around 8watts 24/7 even with my services and without disconnecting the internals. My 8th gen laptop pulls 6watts with the screen on. People here saying older laptops arent a good choice are insane considering the ~$100-300 diffrence between an ewaste laptop and dedicated minipc + backup power bank (laptops have internal batterys you can easily replace when they go bad)
yeah even the best overheating overpowered gaming laptops have way lower power draw compared to your average desktop? It's really not that high or crazy to use an old laptop instead of buying a pi lol.
Pi's are ARM-based, which still to this day limits the scope of their applicability.
Also, you should absolutely inspect a laptop before buying. Many, if not most, of old laptops will run just fine for the next few years.
Untrue.
Until the battery needs replacing, costing more than a pi, one key on the keyboard dies, etc.
Yeah, theres a lot of old old laptops which make no sense to run. But there's a growing crop of more recent used devices that are only being sold off because they don't support Windows 11, and the power efficiency story changes there. The OOP mentions "8.1 lappies"; my main laptop has a 15W 8th gen which is only in the last year starting to feel less appropriate for desktop use. (And honestly, a RAM and storage bump will probably get me another couple years.)
For environmental concerns, youve got to tax new devices with manufacturing costs as well.
100% agree about VMs though.
I think this really depends on the model they're eyeballing because the Pi5 is frankly ridiculous for the price and has absurd power requirements (5V5A USB?). I wouldn't recommend one of these unless you have a specific need like a certain hat or the GPIO pins. You can get a Dell micro Optiplex for less money and have a full fledged i5 or i7 processor with similar power usage.
Plus the RPi Foundation exposed themselves as the greedy bastards they are during COVID which is yet another reason to turn your back on them.
For something like a Pi Zero, maybe go for it, but there are similar devices out there from other companies too.
I picked up a used 2018 Fujitsu office PC with an i5-7500 for $60 (from a physical recycle shop, with a 14 day warranty) and it draws 15W idle. Way better value than a Pi (once you've added case, cooling, PSU etc) for running home server stuff.
A Pi still kills for "Arduino plus plus" use cases where you need the size, GPIO or can optimize the heck out of power usage on a battery.
It's even worth pointing out you can disable various parts of the pi so it uses / needs even less juice.
Absolutely, I've got a cluster of mini PCs with 7th/8th gen T sku i7s, plus an Optiplex SFF running a standard i7-7700, and everything together draws less than 100W on average.