How to turn anything into a router

Seeing an old T60 with an ExpressCard-PCIe bridge used as a router is a great look. It's a solid reminder that even a "trash-picked" 18-year-old machine has way more CPU than you actually need for a home gigabit line. The mention of the serial console (ttyS0) is the real pro-tip in this guide. If you're running a headless box in a closet, a serial getty is a lifesaver for the moment you inevitably misconfigure a firewall rule and lock yourself out of SSH. Sticking to a minimal Debian base with nftables is often much cleaner than using OPNsense/pfSense; there's no GUI abstraction layer hiding what's actually happening to your packets.

I'm curious - for power consumption, considering that you can get RaspPi products for so cheaply, is a discarded laptop more or less impactful on your electrical bill than a RaspPi?

Like is the "free" laptop going to cost you more in the long-run then a nice little power-sipping ARM like a Pi5? Or do you need those extra operations-per-second that the more power-hungry x86 CPU gets you?

This will certainly work, but the whole mesh networking and more advanced aspects of a real wifi router won't really be present.

I get by without it, but I can imagine some won't be able to.

Nobody I know makes routers and more importantly WiFi combo AP in the US except for high end corporate stuff - even the US only cable modem stuff from Comcast are Chinese OEM ???.

Some more idiocy from the FCC chair.

is this the new age .. how to run doom on it?

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tl;dr:

echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward

iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o eth0 -j MASQUERADE

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> you can make a router out of basically anything resembling a computer.

So if anything can be turned into a router will importing anything be banned as well?