[alaudet]

You don't even have to go that old. There are so many companies that upgrade tiny pc's its created a whole self hosting community with the tiny lenovo, hp and dell unit's. It's not only Windows that can be replaced with old hardware but also many online services with proxmox for cloud/nas/dns/vpn/multimedia etc. Of course these are not 2GB systems but you can do some pretty cool things with 8 and 9 year old systems that are literally decommissioned because they are too old. Although a friend of mine who works for a MSP gave me a Lenovo m710q tiny a month ago and its made a pretty good Debian Desktop for my workbench in the garage. I lucked out there because even these tiny's are now going up in price. People have caught on.

[initramfs]

I've purchased a few HP and Dell slim desktops (typically 2nd or 3rd generation i3s) on Newegg, from refurbished resellers. During the pandemic, they were $50-70 shipped and included 4GB of RAM. They support PCI-express in low profile, so I could plug in a monitor with 4k output using just displayport and a Radeon 7470 or an R5 R240. You could even get an i5 for not much more. I even had a couple work from home companies offering to ship the same size machine, Nowadays they are more likely to send a laptop and possibly a docking station, so it's a lot more portable (although I prefer to do without those too).

[drnick1]

Those old tiny/micro PCs make for wonderful TV steaming boxes, and easily replace Fire TV sticks, AppleTV boxes, Rokus and other similar proprietary garbage. They are also great for retro gaming.

[alaudet]

What software do you run on the streaming boxes.

[theandrewbailey]

I work at an ewaste recycling company. Since I started working there over a year ago, over half the micro/tiny desktops I've seen come in are 7th gen i5 at least. In fact, I was using a Dell Optiplex 7050 Micro until about a month ago.

[alaudet]

They could make so much money selling them. I hope they do. I bought a M920 tiny Lenovo with 32GB of RAM and an i5-8500. Stuck a 2TB NVME (when they were reasonable) and the whole thing cost me like $400. It's a proxmox workhorse and a couple of years later I can probably get more than double what I paid for it.