Yeah true. I have an old Asus X550L from 2014, a very budget / mid basic home laptop with the battery removed running as my server. I do some dev on it with VSCode remoting into it and Claude Code, run Jellyfin, Audiobookshelf, Teamspeak, IRC and TS bots, nginx, SyncThing and some static websites.

I'm still usually under 10% cpu usage and at 25% ram usage unless I'm streaming and transcoding with Jellyfin.

It's been fun and super useful. Almost any old laptop from the past 15 years could run and solve several home computing needs with little difficulty.