I have a 2012 HP Elitebook 8560p I inherited from work decom that I used as my primary PC for about 4 years, and even now is my torrent client for public domain movies and is also my 'I guess I just need to use Windows' box after I built my desktop as a Fedora KDE box.
It is heavy, built like a tank, and has all the ports I still expect laptops to have (VGA, cat5, USB A, Optical disk) even when those ports are woefully out of fashion. The only problem is it's all PCI 2 SATA bus so even the cheapest SSD maxes out the system bus. She's starting to feel like flying an Excelsior class starship in the TNG era.
Today's laptops are sans optical disk drive, have lots more 'goodies' like IME and Computrace, have soldered ram (it about killed me to find a 360 degree hinge laptop 2 in 1 with AMD and unsoldered RAM, found one by HP eventually but still it shouldn't have been so hard), and generally are infected with phone-itis where everything has to be skinny, thin, light!! More than one micron thick? Old!
But for all that, said laptop is not my home server, nor are one of my many salvaged 'just in case I need a home server' laptops sitting on my shelf in the computer lab.
Instead I have a random cubicle farm Dell SFF PC that runs my home server, does fine until it randomly locks up, probably overheated Mobo like the OP has mentioned as probable symptoms, mostly because I don't want to play with the configs again! It's all undocumented and manually configured and I haven't put in the work to clean it up and put the configs into nixos or config management yet.
The moral of the story is (I guess) to use config management else all of your computer hardware hoarding may be stymied.
It is heavy, built like a tank, and has all the ports I still expect laptops to have (VGA, cat5, USB A, Optical disk) even when those ports are woefully out of fashion. The only problem is it's all PCI 2 SATA bus so even the cheapest SSD maxes out the system bus. She's starting to feel like flying an Excelsior class starship in the TNG era.
Today's laptops are sans optical disk drive, have lots more 'goodies' like IME and Computrace, have soldered ram (it about killed me to find a 360 degree hinge laptop 2 in 1 with AMD and unsoldered RAM, found one by HP eventually but still it shouldn't have been so hard), and generally are infected with phone-itis where everything has to be skinny, thin, light!! More than one micron thick? Old!
But for all that, said laptop is not my home server, nor are one of my many salvaged 'just in case I need a home server' laptops sitting on my shelf in the computer lab.
Instead I have a random cubicle farm Dell SFF PC that runs my home server, does fine until it randomly locks up, probably overheated Mobo like the OP has mentioned as probable symptoms, mostly because I don't want to play with the configs again! It's all undocumented and manually configured and I haven't put in the work to clean it up and put the configs into nixos or config management yet.
The moral of the story is (I guess) to use config management else all of your computer hardware hoarding may be stymied.