Honestly the only thing stopping me from toting around an old low value laptop is their battery life, which is generally awful. The modern web making their fans get angry and noisy also isn’t great, and barrel jack PSUs are a pain compared to USB-C PD.

It’d be cool if there were efforts to sell kits that allow users to outfit old laptops with higher-capacity (but not physically larger) batteries, quieter cooling, and USB-PD.

Yeah for sure, it's frustrating how there aren't readily-available OEM-quality aftermarket batteries available for older laptops. On the upside as for the barrel jack connectors, you can often get multi-connector AC adapters even with variable voltage output switches. My goal is to figure out a singular solar-charged power source for all my portable devices with built-in batteries, to hopefully have some kind of device-agnostic solution, longer-term... Quite the hassle to figure it all out though!

Any CPU made around or after the time of the Core 2 Duo can still be a perfectly serviceable main computer. Back in the 90s and 00s older CPUs were literally too slow but we passed the MVP threshold around the C2D and now they’re all pretty solid.