I recently acquired a 2 year old Lenovo T530 with 8Gb of RAM, i5 2.6Gh-3.3Ghz CPU, and a new 500Gb Seagate 7200RPM drive. It runs Windows 8.1 x64 Pro. I already have a pretty beefy gaming laptop that I use every day that has an second 24" IPS LED monitor and this is my main workstation. I have a RAID 0 2TB NAS on the network already so I dont need storage space/backups to be stored on this laptop. Im looking for something to do with the T530. It is out of warranty but still a very capable machine that has a lot of life in it. Currently I have it hooked up to the TV in my living room via VGA to stream Twitch to the big screen and using AirWatch from my Note 4 as the remote. What else could I use it for? Im looking for outside the box kind of ideas that arent obvious. For example we all know I could run a linux distro of some kind.
Rather nice laptop for running VMs. Overkill for a VPN router. You could have several VMs on a virtual LAN, although that would work better with more memory. On a Linux host, of course. I just put a Virtualbox Windows VM on a Mint Linux host for someone. It was a nice laptop but not nearly as fast as yours and the Windows VM flew on it.
Thats where my dilemma lies. its a very nice and capable laptop with minimal wear and use. It came out of a corporate environment with a failed HD, but it was out of warranty and wasnt worth fixing with the bulk discounts we get on W550S and T440P laptops.
As MisterB noted, It would be a great VM host. Add a USB NIC, or maybe use vLANs with a suitable switch, and you'd have a very capable "router". You could run arbitrary nested chains of VPNs, JonDo and Tor. There is risk, because someone could easily see your exit IP(s) by joining the LAN. So you'd want to lock it down.
