I found a tiny ASUS EeeBox EB10007 in a literal scrap pile, paid $5 for it, and then did what I always do: I tried to figure out if “old and busted” is actually “secretly useful.” It wouldn’t POST in the store, but once I got it home I realized it was just missing RAM—specifically DDR2 SO-DIMMs, which feels like a crime in 2025. After some very finicky slot-swapping (and a whole lot of dust), I got it running with 4GB and started poking around at the weird-but-kind-of-cool IO, the 2.5" SATA bay, the mini PCIe slot, and that random eSATA port. From there I installed Debian 12 on a 1TB SATA SSD, checked power draw (about 14W idle, ~17W with Home Assistant running), and then confirmed what the specs already warned me about: the Intel Atom D410 is painfully slow. Geekbench 6 was… not pretty. Still, Home Assistant in Docker actually worked, which surprised me, and I even tried turning it into a janky NAS using a 5-bay eSATA enclosure—only to run into port multiplier limitations. In the end, my takeaway is simple: it’s not “good” in 2025, but it’s not totally useless either—especially if you basically get it for free and power is cheap where you live.