This takes me back. My dad worked for IBM and had access to many broken thinkpads (mostly broken displays) so he would bring them home for me to tinker but in the end I installed debian on them, installed ISPconfig and rented out webspace from the laptops running under my bed.
Laptops are awesome for servers since they have built in UPS's and are not very power hungry
It was a fun experience and got me started on my road to becoming a MSP
Yes! This was actually my first shot at home servers as well - same rationale and all. Old Pentium laptops seemed to get thrown out every few weeks, easily ran Windows Server 2003 (I hadn't seen the light yet), were reasonably easy to repair, used very little power, and were practically silent in operation.
Someday I'd like to chronicle how my homelab evolved, but at the end of the "laptops" generation and immediately prior to the "VMware on a desktop" generation, I had an old DEC (Intel), an AST, and a Gateway laptop, all running under my parents' couch.
Laptops are awesome for servers since they have built in UPS's and are not very power hungry
It was a fun experience and got me started on my road to becoming a MSP