I have an old Rock laptop (3.4ghz, 1gb ram, 60gb HD) which has died on me. I think the display is busted. However, I don't really want to bin it and was wondering if anyone has any interesting ideas for canabalising it and making something useful from it.
Idea's requiring the purchase of parts etc also welcome.
if it's only the display that isn't working, how about hooking it up to the TV using a pc to tv converter and having access to your computer on your main tv for internet radio / video / youtube, etc. That's what I use an old laptop computer for.
I have an old Rock laptop (3.4ghz, 1gb ram, 60gb HD) which has died on me. I think the display is busted. However, I don't really want to bin it and was wondering if anyone has any interesting ideas for canabalising it and making something useful from it.
Idea's requiring the purchase of parts etc also welcome.
Phil
If its a Pentium 4 (Not a P4M) then junk it. When the P4M (Mobile) cost far more than a desktop P4 CPU many of the laptop manufacturers decided to use the desktop CPU in laptops. The piece of crap was such a power hog and heat pig that a battery charge usually never lasted mroe than an hour and the power supply was a brick. Eventually they would cook themselves because there was no adequate way to dissapate all the heat from that CPU.
Car computer. Run mpd and huge stash of music on it, playing through stereo, also streaming to tablet, and functioning as NAS for tablet (start a batch of transcoded movies transfering from car-computer to tablet when you start your drive, they're on by the end).
Don't know how good Linux BT support is in general (I know HFP isn't really working on tablets, but maybe better on desktop Linux), but if you could make it talk HFP to your cell-phone, and stream to/from your tablet by wi-fi... All sorts of options.
I've an old laptop, with good display, that I'm going to do such stuff with when I've time.
I had a laptop with a busted screen and used it for three years running Ipcop firewall. You could run other types of servers on it. Having a battery in the laptop means you have backup power too.
