What to do with a spare laptop?
fsniper: I'm using my old celeron 1.5GHz laptop as a linux server for my company. It runs dhcpd, bind for the network, apache, mysql, postgresql, tomcat for development purposes, zoneminder for a camera (not in use anymore), in all their respective openvz containers. And it's doing pretty well with a cooler. Before the cooler it was hot as hell. Just only once, I put my lucene indexer in ab infinite loop that i had not figured out before it shut self down with it's acpi cpu protection rules :). 
So if you're in need of a simple server try it.