Reusing My Old Laptop, Acer Aspire 3610

2026-05-02 - Tech - English

This is a note for one of my plan to reuse my Acer Aspire 3610 from 2004. It’s boasting Intel Pentium M 725A clocked at 1.7 GHz with Intel GMA Graphics, with 2 GB 1x DDR2 RAM and 80 GB of IDE HDD. Pretty old for today’s standard, obviously.

The previous plans were like these: I use it as a local file and music server; I use it as a small media consumption device; I use it to game on Windows; or specifically for emulation that could use distro like Batocera Linux or something similar.

And I actually have been using it for several things during 2025, for example as a second monitor for my desktop when using Windows, a Windows XP note-taking and classic gaming setup, and then a webserver running some services I use locally and remotely using Cloudflare Tunnel.

For the webserver specifically, I have been running Copyparty, Plex, Navidrome, Piwigo, BentoPDF, and lighttpd on that laptop for months. And despite its limitation, it was a great experience and seems not put this laptop in such a stress. It was kinda fascinating to see it in action myself.

But the bad news is the laptop is currently unable to turn on because the power bricked was busted and won’t turn on. I had to find a replacement, but I suspend this project until I finished my college stuff first. But the webserver and self-host thing isn’t done and keep continue but on my desktop instead. I run Copyparty and Navidrome for local purpose, but I also run a Snac2 instance in a Debian VM inside. It’s fun.