https://www.pcmag.com/news/avoid-the-trash-heap-15-great-uses-for-an-old-pc
In 2019, after seven years of slumps, PC sales went up by the tiniest increment—0.3 percent. Demand then surged in recent weeks as people shifted to work-from-home setups due to COVID-19 quarantines. Which means some of you may be getting a new computer. But what do you do with the old PC?
You may be tempted to go the easy route and just junk it. But don't. If that laptop or desktop was created any time in the last decade, you'd be surprised by how much life you (or others) can get out of it. I'm not talking about limping along, but of ways to bring an old PC back to useful life.
[This editor can vouch for plenty of life in old boxes. For the past 4 years, a now-nearly-decade-year-old Core 2 Duo Laptop with 6 GB RAM has been my primary computer.--martyb]
(Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Friday May 01 2020, @02:26AM
Raspberry Pi 4 Review: The Gold Standard for Single-Board Computing [tomshardware.com]
Those are the benchmarks from launch. It is likely faster in some cases since new firmware updates [raspberrypi.org] should eliminate thermal throttling scenarios, and overclocking from 1.5 GHz to 2.0 GHz is possible even with passive cooling (e.g. aluminum FLIRC case).
It's considerably faster than the Pi 3B+. Pi 4B has been compared to a 2007 desktop, but it could be better in some areas. Performance can be increased more by using an external SSD over a USB 3.0 port instead of a microSD card.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]