When my old laptop was finally broken enough that I bought a new one, I disassembled it and reluctantly put its components next to a Pentium II board and an awesome old SCSI hardware RAID controller into a drawer. The display is still good, and so is its motherboard and IO boards. Still a working peace of tech, but without a working battery, solid case and fully functioning keyboard it's of no use to me. Unless I had a use case for another computer that's neither good for travelling nor powerful enough to justify being a stationary PC, this thing would rot in this drawer. But I had an idea for a case that would give it a new purpose as a media station. One mSATA system SSD, three 2.5" media HDDs (or SSDs), a wooden enclosure, six large copper heat sinks that would protrude the left wall to allow for passive cooling of the CPU and GPU. The picture in my mind is really nice, it has a 4th gen mobile i7 CPU, a decent GPU, a good enough DAC, all relevant video outputs, I have the parts, drive bays, heat sinks, heat pipes, wood, ... But, it was apparently never important enough to me to get started. I doubt I'd use an HTPC much. And so it is still rotting in that drawer.
Does anybody want that PC? I'd build it.
Now my new laptop has started to degrade. Battery, keyboard, touch pad. all the parts that wouldn't be required to turn it into a stationary HTPC. It lacks the four SATA ports. But it has a fast NVME and a fast enough USB for more than four SATA ports, needs less power, the mainboard is much smaller. So it would also be a good candidate for such a PC. But I still don't need it except as a travel notebook. Sooo, I guess that's the end of this PC case idea.