I have a 10 year old laptop of very low specs. I had given a detailed description of the specs and made a post regarding the use to which it can be put, and more or less everyone pointed to self hosting.
Now, if the machine is powerful enough, why not put it to some productive use ??
And so l’m exploring an unknown territory.
Your laptop has 500gb of storage. Start by trying to use it as a NAS. A simple SMB share or SFTP share would be good enough.
You can offload unimportant data to it save storage on your phone or other machines.
You can share this storage with your household, make it like a photos backup. But at this stage all the backups will need to be made manually. Once you get the hang of basic networking. You could consider hosting immicjy, which is like a google photos alternative with native apps for automatic backups.
As someone else suggest, jellyfin is also a good idea. Your laptop does not need to be good enough to transcode the films/shows, if they are in simple formats which your TV, phone or other clients can decode. 500gb can hold a lot of films.
Other services like hosting an email is not easy. It it not dependent on you machine only, but also on your ISP. Most ISPs in India do not allow port-forwarding.
Just learn the basics about networking, maybe about docker or podman. YouTube has tons of resources, like DBTech.