Netbooks usefulness

[TRex22]

I have two netbooks. An Acer Aspire One ZG5 with a weak and low capcity battery since it has been heavily used for nearly 4 years and an Asus eee pc 701 2g surf. I use the aspire one for a couple of tasks like typing, testing networks and a bit of programming or surfing the web. I got the ASUS to work with SliTaz Linux distro but it does not multitask well and can be slow. Im a avid gamer, programmer and I like to mess around with tech. I would just liek to know what I can do with these devices more so the ASUS. I dont want to sell them but I would like to do some cool things with them. The Acer is able to do quite a lot computationally since I did add 1gb extra ram but the ASUS is minute in computational ability and I really dont know what I can do with it. I dont want to waste the ASUS and I want to use it for some function. The Acer is mainly dead and I leave it on to download stuff while using lower power than my desktop. Any Ideas would be appreciated.

 

[Pada]

Like you've already said: use them for automated/scheduled downloading with like SickBeard, CouchPotato and SABnzbd

My dad is using an ancient laptop for temperature monitoring around the house. I'm using my HP Microserver (which could've been done with a Netbook too) to automatically download stuff (with SickBeard + SABnzbd), as well as monitoring my UPS and Internet connection (with Zabbix).

 

[TRex22]

My big problem is that I not only have a very good desktop pc which downloads flawlessly, and a experimental server im building but the acer netbook has heating problems and the asus gets to 3gb and cant handle more. (Ive tried) these netbooks are old second hand with the asus being in good condition but very slow. Ive been advised to use Android or Ubuntu mobile. Would their performance be good? Remeber I only have 2gb space to play with.
I really want to give them new life. I tried installing dos on the Acer but I wanted win 3.1 for all my old stuff which I have a lot of. (Games cool old apps ect...) Windows just freaked out and was pretty much useless.

 

[garyc]

Since you are experimenting with servers:

I use a old netbook with a moderately light Linux OS as a VNC/SSH client. This allows me to run the servers at home in headless mode and access them via the netbook. Less mess lying around, cheaper and more comfortable to work on a server from the couch.