I’ve got an Acer Aspire from 2008 running mint on an Intel Atom and 1 GB memory (might be 2, I forget). It is slow but very usable except for video and such.

Yeah you usually can. LibreOffice works fine for most things. Some classes need things like Solid works that only run on Windows, and the remote testing software can be a nightmare. You might get an O365 license as part of your enrollment but doubt you really need it.

Protip; learn how to typeset your papers in something like LyX and integrate Zotero for citation management. The typesetting usually got me a few extra points alone.

Same - can sync snapshots from Truenas to Backblaze.

If you want to get real fancy you could stash an N40L cube server at your mom’s house where she will never find it and VPN back to your local network and replicate snapshots to it

It worked perfectly well to install though? Like why does it matter if its old

In Linux you just download, extract, and change the symlink. It is really easy.

Really only if you’re running your own email server. Otherwise as far as I know dynamic DNS fills the need.
You aren’t in any more risk either way.

Sounds like maybe you want to look into pfsense to do traffic filtering. Highly recommend.

Not strictly amateur radio but RTL-SDR projects are cheap and fun.

Hmm I have none of these issues

No, POE. Just the round black ones, I forget the model.

The only gotcha I can think of is the 4k bandwidth, better make sure you can handle more than one camera on your network.

Not parent, but Zoneminder locally with the zmninja app works pretty well. VPN allows remote access, so it is slightly complicated but not too bad.

Reolink and Zoneminder has been working fine. Put the cameras in a vlan, block their access except to the ZM server, you can use any IP camera.