Rejuvinating an old laptop… with electrical tape

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.

 

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Ouch…

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:

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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?

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Partway through the taping

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:

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Starting to take form…

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

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Tape starting to lift in the top-right corner, this was later fixed. The answer, of course, was more tape.

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!

Don’t try this at home

My little Samsung netbook’s power supply died, so I thought I would see if it was an easy fix. Turns out the components are too tightly packed and coated with silicone adhesive-y stuff to easily find what is broken, but I did manage to shoot a video of a 150VDC capacitor discharge:

And that’s why you shouldn’t tinker with power supplies!