hey all. ive got 2 outdated laptops i want to make use of. one is a compaq circa 2008 and the other is an acer circa 2010. the acer actually has decent specs for what it is. no idea on what i want to do with them, but i would like them to be useful in some way shape or form. any ideas? im not real super technically inclined when it comes to the newer operating systems or DOS, but i can follow instructions well. for one of them i was toying with the idea of an entire operating system on a thumb drive. that way i can loan it out to whoever set them up with theyre own drive and never have to worry about them clogging up my computer with all kinds of crap. (maintenance free. they mess up they're install, just install a fresh one on they're drive.)

is this even possible? as for the other computer, any ideas are welcome! thanks guys.

You can setup just about any flavor of Linux on a 8GB thumbdrive. Ubuntu is a favorite choice for this. But remember, if you boot from a thumbdrive, that doesn't mean you can't see the main hard drive and its contents. Linux is far more powerful then MS and in the wrong hands, can cause more harm. I say find a place to donate them to. Some kid in high school could use one.

I'll second the Linux option. I'm running the latest Linux Mint (a derivative of Ubuntu) on a nine-year-old HP laptop. It runs better--and faster--than it ever did with the Windows XP it was designed to run. A lot of people regard Linux as very difficult to use because it requires knowledge of the command line interface but Ubuntu and Mint are both very user friendly with little or no use of the command line needed.

One nice thing about Linux is that it runs by default in standard user mode with administrative privileges turned off. You have to specifically log in as "root" to access high level administrative functions. This is the exact opposite of Windows or MacOS, which run in administrative mode by default.

Give Linux a try. It'* free and you just might like it.