← Back | written January 29th, 2026

baby homelab, thinkpad sale:

First and foremost, short and sweet news, I sold the X220 I had previously purchased on eBay for $40, then refurbished. I put $123 into it total (including the $40 price tag), refurbished and modified it, listed it as a privacy modded laptop, and about 1 week after listing it, it sold for $329.99 + $20 shipping. eBay will likely take a huge cut, so I'll see something more like $265 (my calculated guesstimate) leaving me with a $140 profit. Once it's settled and they've received their item and I don't receive any complaints after 3 days, I'll go through and finally calculate my ThinkBalance for the first time this year. It's likely to still be in the negative, but almost balanced to $0, and that's with three ThinkPads still in my possession. I have another ThinkPad, a bios locked X230, that is just sitting here waiting to be modded. It'll likely be 10 days before I feel safe to reinvest the money into new parts, and another 10 days to receive all those parts, so I won't even be able to begin refurbishing the X230 until the middle of February, but I'm hoping I can sell one in February and keep up this minimum of 1 laptop flipped per month.

SUPER grateful it sold, it's a relief to know my concept worked out, I wish I had more money to inject into this to get the ball rolling faster. I am profiting with each build, but because it takes literally a month just to build and sell one due to financial restrictions, increasing that monthly profit will be difficult. The goal is to eventually be able to have two up, two down: two finished laptops listed, one being actively worked on and prepared, and one waiting with parts on the way, at all times, to keep a flow going. Only being able to have a listing up for one week of the month is a huge bottleneck and I'd like to have at least one finished laptop listed at all times throughout the month. The fact that the laptop had a minimum of 13 watchers by time of sale shows me there's a market for privacy modded hardware!

My baby homelab:

I'll be honest, I did not know a person could have so much fun with one laptop and a little ethernet switch.

This is my little homelab! My first server, my first LAN network (comprised of a single Network GS305 unmanaged switch I got in the mail today and two computers), my first laptop that is CLI (command line interface) only, no GUI (graphical user interface.) Fedora 43 Server Edition installed on a ThinkPad T430 (which I've yet to decide if I'm going to keep as my server or if I'm going to refurbish it and resell it, because it could be good stock! I have like 5 other cheaper laptops with no resale potential I could use instead.) I set a static IP for both my windows 10 tower and this laptop, they're both connected via ethernet wires, I've even done some remote controlling of the server in command prompt with ssh on Windows 10, and also in Firefox with a web console, and I plan on keeping the thinkpad disconnected from the internet most of the time, primarily using it as a NAS (network attached storage) and doing little experiments on.

What is a homelab? Someone explained it basically as just your own sandbox for experimenting with computers and computing, and that can be as small as a single laptop you do try different distros of Linux on. I have some 'useless' laptops that I'll be adding to my setup, mainly to start my Linux Arch journey as a learning experience. I have some options, enough options to confuse me about what I should be doing XD I have two really chunky 2009 15.6" core 2 duo laptops, one is an old Dell Inspiron 1545, the other is an old Compaq Presario (is compaq still around?), a ThinkPad X120e (don't let the name fool you, this laptop isn't worth anything), and two soldered down netbooks that I'd really have to find a purpose for with their limited ram and tiny storage. That's my options from my junk pile of laptops. I also have my ThinkPad T430 that I'm currently set up as my first server, an X230 I'm waiting to refurbish, and my Macbook Pro. I don't know if any of them are truly the perfect solution. If I had to choose just one, I'd go with the X230, but that is verifiably stock inventory. I bought it for $40 and I can easily turn it into a $400 machine (people don't realize how versatile those laptops are, even for their low specs and dated hardware). The Inspiron 1545 and the Compaq are super dated, they're not good for much else besides light web browsing, light server hosting, and doing experiments on. They're actually perfect hardware for my server experiments, except for the fact that they're so freaking big and likely power hungry. The T430 is kind of at the max size of what I'm comfortable having sit on my desk and plugged in all the time. The X230's smaller footprint would be far more ideal. I do enjoy the T430's tasteful thickness, however, and having a socketed CPU laptop around is just cool because you never see that anymore. The MacBook is relegated as a mobile creative machine - I'm keeping it on MacOS for now. The two Chromebooks are just TOO underpowered to be useful for anything aside from turning them into targets for some weird experiment. The X120e might.. MIGHT be powerful enough, if I max it out with 8gb of ram, to use as a server. I just wish it were a bit more powerful, like the X220 or X230.

Anyway, here's my homelab goal: 2 dedicated servers (one offline nas, one online for a website), 1 experimental Arch build computer to learn more on. I'm having way more fun with this than I thought I would, and I think I may fiddle around a bit more with my server computer, maybe install Hyprland upon suggestion from iSmile.

-Onio