What do you do with a busted laptop?  Many people are quick to throw them away.  Others turn them into FreeNAS boxes, or other useful servers.  For the machine I inherited today, I decided to turn it into an all-in-one style desktop PC.  The screen still worked, it was able to boot windows – the only trouble being that it was in physically rough shape.

 

Basically, the screen had become detached from the rest of the machine – but all the cables were still in place for it to function.  After some light tweaking, I was able to get the screen to flip around the body of the laptop and sit flat on the reverse side:

But how to keep it in place?  Being impatient and lazy (usually a dangerous combination), I tried my lucking using an entire roll of electrical tape to keep it all together.  Because why not?

Being that this thing is going to mount against something on the reverse, I removed the keyboard as well.  So it’s not bumping its keys into stuff all the time.

As luck would have it, I had an old monitor stand kicking around – works as a nice little kickstand. Not perfectly stable, but still more solid than I was expecting:

Now all that’s left is to wipe the old Vista install and put on a fresh OS…

A few hours of tinkering, an old laptop, some electrical tape, and a fresh Xubuntu install made for a perfectly good bedroom workstation.  Not bad for one night!