If you've upgraded to a new Strix Halo or Qualcomm mini PC, you might be wondering what to do with your old mini PC. After all, it'd be a shame to let a device that still has some life in it languish in a drawer with the rest of your tech junk. Give them a new lease of life by putting them into use with a project, either as a long-term replacement for a smart home hub or a learning device while you decide on something more permanent.

And with their low power consumption, good single-core performance, and speedy storage, almost any mini PC from the last five years or so has the chops to be reused for any number of home projects. You could start home lab experimentation, build a DNS-level blocker to keep your whole network safer, or take on any number of low-effort, quick projects to keep that old mini PC from becoming dusty e-waste.

Starter Proxmox home lab server

You don't need a lot of power to get going

Proxmox VE is one of our favorite virtualization platforms, and it's perfect for installing on old mini PCs. It'll run on anything with an x86 processor and 2GB of RAM, although that also depends on what you want to run on it. For containerized workloads, you're going to be able to get away with the lower end, while most Linux distributions require 4GB or more as the bare minimum.

I've used it on several N100 and N150-based mini PCs, and even with half a dozen containers running, they weren't fazed. Virtual machines are a bit different, and you'll be RAM-limited in that case, but if your mini PC lets you upgrade parts, you might be able to pick up some old RAM for cheap, since the market wants newer modules right now.

Media server

Best done with Intel-based mini PCs for transcoding support

Whether you go for Plex, Jellyfin, OpenMediaVault, or Emby, a mini PC makes a fantastic media server. If it's got an Intel CPU, Quicksync will make short work of any transcoding needs, and you can even have it plugged into your TV as a player thanks to the HDMI output. I started my home media server on an SBC, but that was a decade ago, and mini PCs were expensive and underpowered.

Anything more recent will be fantastic for serving 4K streams, even with transcoding, and you'll only use a few more watts than the SBC would in total. Plus, you'll have plenty of USB ports to add game controllers or IR receivers to turn the mini PC into a proper TV entertainment box. You can even stretch it further by adding apps for your most-used streaming services, since it'll be far more powerful than whatever chip is already inside your TV.

Home Assistant hub

Take back control of your smart home

The modern smart home has a fragmentation problem. There are too many companies entrenched in their own ecosystems to give ground and coexist, leading to missing functionality or frustrations with control. But by installing Home Assistant on a mini PC, you can tame that unruly menagerie of smart devices, with an open source platform to rule them all.

It's hands-down the best home automation tool as well, with a robust scripting engine that can turn almost any sensor, entity or device into a trigger to set up deep customization, helping your home work for you, instead of having to fight with voice control or competing systems. The community makes it even better, where you can find scripts, add-ons and integrations for almost any smart device, even if they don't have an official add-on.

Retro gaming emulation station

Old tech for old games, what a winning combination

The Raspberry Pi might be the first thing many think of when setting up an emulation station, an old mini PC is a better option in almost every case. You'll get more graphical power, more USB ports for peripherals, better loading because you're not using a microSD card or USB drive, and more stable internet connectivity. Oh, and you'll get full-sized HDMI ports, which is a blessing compared to the micro-HDMI used on SBCs nowadays.

Mini PCs are perfect for LAN parties too, and you can happily play most eSports titles on integrated graphics. Or take things old-school and play Quake, Half-Life, CS1.6, or Unreal Tournament, and make a weekend of it. Just make sure you stock up on energy drinks, because those Starcraft 2 marathons get hectic and you'll want all the energy you can muster.

Roll your own router and firewall

Almost anything is more powerful than the chips in consumer routers

The router your ISP provided you with is barely enough to get online, let alone to keep you safe. Making your own with a mini PC not only teaches you more about how networking works, but also makes your home network better, faster, and safer. You'll get access to advanced network features, plugins for security suites, DNS servers, reverse proxies, and all kinds of tools that your ISP (or most consumer routers) don't want you to have.

The only real provisio is that you don't want to do this with a mini PC that only has one Ethernet port. You'll want at least two, one for WAN and one for LAN, a managed switch to add more wired ports, and an access point for Wi-Fi. You've got choices for software as well, with OPNsense and IPFire among the more common options to check out. And it almost doesn't matter how old your mini PC is, because it's practically guaranteed to have more RAM and a more powerful CPU than the ones used in even the latest consumer routers.

DNS and adblocking server

Keep your network free of annoyances

The modern web is full of annoyances, almost as many as the spam calls about your car's extended warranty, which are a nearly daily occurrence in my house. Take back control of your browsing by hosting your own upstream DNS resolver on a mini PC and cut out unwanted traffic before it even reaches your devices.

You can make this as complex as you want, with more advanced DNS servers enabling you to run a cluster for high availability and take advantage of split DNS, which lets you use different URLs for devices on your home network than when you're connecting from outside.

Even older mini PCs can still be useful

With most mini PCs using under 30W of power even at full speed, they're a cost-effective way to self-host services that need 24/7 availability. That makes even the oldest mini PCs you have in your home useful, long past when they've stopped being useful for everyday desktop computing tasks.