You don’t need to re-case them. I had three old thinkpads as servers a few years ago. Took the batteries out and connected them to Ethernet switch. Built in KVM. Job done!
Aside from aesthetics, I also want to re-case them for better airflow than what's in the laptop body. There can be quite a lot of sustained performance to unlock this way, as laptops thermal-throttle a lot compared to servers and desktops.
A slightly less-performant server is better than no server :)
I gave up on worrying about those details - just installed ProxMox, set it on a shelf in the basement, moved on. Works great for the tasks I'm running.
Well, it depends on what you use it for. I was thinking about using it for distributed workloads which is more intense than average.
I was even thinking about how much mileage could one get from a rack of old laptop logic boards. Gaming laptops sold for parts are much, much cheaper than "real" server hardware. It appeals to me because of the reuse aspect as well.
I had an old dell laptop that had a double-high pcmcia port and I inserted two xircom realport LAN cards and had a very nice router with three NICs and no dongles.
How have battery management systems not evolved to deal with this issue? It's especially confusing considering the massive number of laptops deployed by companies to part time work-from-home employees many of whom keep their devices plugged in nearly 100% of the time.
They haven't evolved to stop issues happening, partly because many a consumer won't understand the need so won't accept it (I'm returning this because it never charges to 100%) and there isn't enough demand from elsewhere for it to affect sales of devices (in office environments those laptops are usually cycled out before it would be a significant issue anyway).
But these days there are often controls in place to cut off power if things look bad (battery getting too hot, mainly) so things are more likely to die on their own rather than setting fire to themselves and anything near-by.