

you should indeed use one as your home media server. but you may not need to figure out how to control them. if you have a smart TV or a Roku, then you can always just set up a Jellyfin on the server and stream to your TV, which would allow you to use your normal remote.
for the other one, you can turn it into a NAS for backup purposes or something. there’s honestly a ton of different things you can do fairly easily.










Well, I’ve read about people using Mac Minis as home servers, so I’m assuming that one is more powerful than the HP laptop. You’ll probably want to make it the media server. With a Jellyfin server, Jellyseer for media discovery, and a full Servarr stack for fetching TV shows and movies, you’ll be set with a almost fully automated system for watching whatever you want. All you gotta do is tell it what shows you’re interested in.
The HP laptop doesn’t need to be all powerful in order to function as a NAS, so that’s a good job for something with such weak specs. I would remove the battery though. If you keep it plugged in all the time you won’t need it, and batteries that stay charged all the time will end up being ruined anyway. Better to just recycle that than to risk ending up with a spicy pillow.