this post was submitted on 16 Apr 2025
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Just found this in a box and according to some Googling, its TPD is 6.8w!!! Got Debian on there with LXDE but I don't need another laptop. The big drawback is that it has a 32bit processor. It has a 100mbit network port, USB2.0, 2gb RAM and WiFi which isn't working but is listed in ip -a

I've used it to add wireless capabilities to my ancient Brother laser printer but it was extremely slow ( 15 mins before a text page started printing, PER PAGE)

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[–] sj_zero@lotide.fbxl.net 7 points 1 week ago

The n280 is specifically limited since it's 32-bit, but low powered machines can be useful regardless. Two of the servers in my empire of dirt are atom d2550s, and I'm even able to run proxmox on them (since that model is 64-bit), but in terms of bare metal, they were able to run Matrix conduit, ejabbered, a nostr relay, and for a while my searx and yacy instances. (Though as I recall the cpus lack of instructions eventually stopped me from running searx on that hardware) I think I was even able to run invidious.

If it's just for you, it would surprise you how much you can do with a very small amount of CPU power.

Another thing that a machine like that might be useful for is a jump box. You can just put a very light distribution on it, and make it accessible to the outside world and one way or the other (secured of course) so you can hop into it if you need to do any remote administration.

The one thing that I found when I was using stuff that was particularly low powered is drive latency matters a lot. If you are using an SSD for storage, even much faster processors end up spending a lot of time sitting there waiting for the spinning hard drive to get to where it needs to be so you can be a lot more efficient with less CPU power.