16 year old laptop to home server, Can it happen?

[coolbean28]

So I have a 16 year old HP Pavilion DV6 1190 EG and I had the Idea of transforming it into a basic home server for some light data analytics. Any ideas?

 

 

[LloydLynx]

Throw a light weight OS on it and do your thing. The difference between a computer and a server is what the machine is used for.

[emosun]

1 hour ago, coolbean28 said:

So I have a 16 year old HP Pavilion DV6 1190 EG and I had the Idea of transforming it into a basic home server for some light data analytics. Any ideas?

 

 

Well any machine that conforms to the network its connected to can be a server so should work fine if it's compatible.

[linuxChips2600]

Define "light data analytics"

Also you could do a server setup with that aforementioned laptop, but my advice would be to not expect too much out of a 16 year old AMD laptop processor (assuming that this site has the specs right for your laptop), and to swap out the HDD for an SSD if possible since otherwise if you throw any "meaningful" workload at the thing in terms of "modern" workloads that laptop will probably gonna slow to a crawl.

This is speaking from experience as a person who personally upgraded the HDD of an HP Pavilion p6267c-b desktop to a Crucial SATA SSD; the CPU became the bottleneck after the upgrade but unfortunately the PC contained a lot of important family files so yea

[coolbean28]

Do you know a free lightweight OS?

[linuxChips2600]

10 hours ago, coolbean28 said:

Do you know a free lightweight OS?

Well there's Minix, Xubuntu, Void Linux, etc. etc. Without more details such as the specific type of workloads you're running (e.g. Apache Hadoop, Sqlite, Grafana, etc.) unfortunately there's only so much we may do to help...

[coolbean28]

Ok thank you. I was planning on doing some stock analytics so I can get into investing.

[linuxChips2600]

On 4/15/2024 at 10:16 PM, coolbean28 said:

Ok thank you. I was planning on doing some stock analytics so I can get into investing.

Unfortunately that is not something I'm familiar with; hopefully someone else may be of better assistance here. Thank you for sharing nonetheless.

[superbrett2000]

You'll probably want to upgrade the ram on that laptop (I think it has 4GB?) and install an SSD. After that it should be a serviceable server. For a while I was using an old Intel Q6600 build for lightweight server duty until I started using my main PC as the server since I needed the space and I kept my PC on most of the time anyway.

 

One bottleneck you'll find is that if additional storage space is needed then you'll probably need an external solution (I've seen decent looking multi-drive enclosures that are reasonably priced) for your storage and that laptop predates USB 3 so the bottleneck will be pretty severe. 

 

It's tough to say how well that laptop will stand up to your analytics. I'm assuming you'll want to run it as a SQL server? Or just raw processing of data? I think that's going to heavily depend on just how large of data sizes you're talking about (like just 20 or 30k or hundreds of thousands) and I presume you'd be the only person running queries. 

[coolbean28]

Sounds good, I'll look into some ssd's and make sure that they are compatible.

[jaslion]

On 4/16/2024 at 4:16 AM, coolbean28 said:

Ok thank you. I was planning on doing some stock analytics so I can get into investing.

The people that do that tend to have like THE BEST pc's in the world to crunch every digit as fast as possible.

 

This is likely the be a terrible usecasw for this laptop but you can of your try and do a trail on it

[coolbean28]

First part of the upgrade done, I had a old Toshiba laptop that I took the ram out of so I could upgrade the HP pavilion. Working on finding an SSD that is compatible. Thanks for all the help and I'll keep you posted