Electronic devices will generally stop working at some point due to age, when e.g. their capacitors dry up or swell or whatever. Even if you keep the device in a safe.

Sure you can try to make them work by replacing the components that have stopped working etc., but good luck with that.

Well this seems ironic.

I install VNC and remote controls on my laptop (mostly so i can access it on the same screen/mouse as another computer) and the backlight of the screen seems to be out.

As has been noted here
and here
an old computer is a terrific server.

I would set up a firewall on it, to create a DMZ.

The idea is quite nice although it will be used offline no matter what.
1st reason is that the place the laptop will be used have a mettered connection, and the available traffic is very low by today standards.
2nd reason, I really don´t want more devices with internet connection, have enough at the moment :D

At this time the computer is used as an oscilloscope but the integrated sound card is terrible at that (I can explain why a little deeper if anyone interested).
The problem is I am quite a energy saving freak (in my defence, I have reasons for this :P) and pretty much what this laptop can do, a Raspberry do it better with 10% of the used energy.

I believe it will be used on my "man cave" for playing music and have some older/lower spec games running (like HOMM) while doing my stuff. I bought a cheap, old 850W home cinema used, just for that.
Since I have some things to sort out (mainly power consumption of the home cinema system wich is 35w+ just idling), in the meanwhile I still following this thread ideas.
I use a tablet for that... Is great to take your desktop with you in every house place and controll it with touch screen :D

Indeed.. But the touch keyboard is so... crappy...

Not even a performance-focused emulator like ZSNES?

(I note that the clock speed of the laptop's CPU is actually a bit higher than that of the Raspberry Pi 4, and emulation of consoles that old only makes use of a single core.)

The language that you are referring to is nothing like the BASIC found on early microcomputers.

(Incidentally, after looking into MSX BASIC after learning more modern programming languages, I can appreciate how programming languages have improved over the years. Back then, you had to worry about things like line numbers, not having while loops or procedures that take parameters (so recursion wasn't practical), variable names having only two significant characters and having to make sure they don't even *contain* a reserved word (so no TOTAL (TO), FOREST (FOR), DOOR (OR), etc. as variable names).)

The OP seems to have a better machine for every use and does not seem to be poor so I actually have a radically new suggestion since there is no use for that laptop:
Give it away to someone who does not have a computer!

This was kind of what I intended to do with my old laptop. It had the best keyboard of any computer I've ever used, but performance had gone down the drain and it had become outdated to run more hardware-demanding games. Plus, it would give me an excuse to finally get into Linux. Alas, it seems to be way more damaged than I remembered (I could barely start it to check if there were any important files left to copy, and both its battery and the spare battery are fried), so the task doesn't seem worth the time/effort/money anymore.

I do have several computers and a awfull lot of individual parts laying around, as I built computers for fun.
The idea is good and had gifted several computers before, infortunatelly I don´t know anyone who would benefit with a laptop like this. Is really that slow to use today, javascript full websites take minutes to open, modern smartphones are way faster.
let me try ZSNES.
Regarding clock speed, I'm not entirelly sure both architectures can be compared clock for clock. Either way, despite the emulator only use 1 thread, the system use some resources as well and is always beneficial to have more threads in my experience.

Just realise that one day the day comes when it is time to deem even a working computer as waste and send it to recycling.

Just tried ZSNES 1.51 with Street Fighter Alpha 2 and the sound is a bit laggy. Stock config with 0 frame skip.


On the Casio calculator I'm refering, the variables can only be one letter, so the programs are very limited.
One of the first games I tried to make, was a "snake game" clone (like in the old mobile phones) using 1 variable to store vertical position and another variable to store the horizontal one. The game was slow AF and very limited in the size of the tail, soon after discovered it was possible to use a table to store all the data, the speed of the game increased at least 10x.

I learn a little BASIC on MS-DOS around that time, where I did some simple calculators. I don't remember much about it but only the core language was the same, even the way to store variables was different.