very old laptop Answered

hack it!! find an interesting hack and imply it! the best way to reuse a laptop is to use it in a way that it wasn't supposed to be. the black connector closest to the keyboard and mouse connections is a vga port. you can plug an external monitor into it. next is a LAN connection, and then the paralel port, and i think the next might be a printer or scsi port

lol my teacher would love that, we cant find computers anymore with serial ports to program our Cisco routers with.

always have to but those adapters

Older computers make great "security" monitors.  That is, they have enough power to drive many security systems (especailly one built by one's self). 

I have used a TANDY Color Computer for such.

you could give it to me im starting a collection

You could boot DSL or another teeny tiny Linux and run a bunch of little scientific apps off of it, for calculations and graphs and the like. Tool's ideas sound great too, but I would definitely recommend Linux for something this old...

You could throw it at a robber during a mugging. It would probably cause brain trauma.

Presuming it works, you could just use it for the retro chic aspect. Or since it has a parallel port do a google for parallel port data logging, if the port is bidirectional you can build various add ons like oscilloscopes, temperature sensors, humidity sensors, etc.