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.
![100_1217](http://troydenton.ca/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/100_1217-300x168.jpg)
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?
![100_1225](http://troydenton.ca/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/100_1225-300x168.jpg)
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:
![100_1230](http://troydenton.ca/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/100_1230-300x168.jpg)
Now all that’s left is to wipe the old Vista install and put on a fresh OS…
![100_1232](http://troydenton.ca/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/100_1232-300x168.jpg)
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!