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Rehabilitating Damaged Laptops
Rollie Hawk writes "It breaks my heart to see a computer in need of a good home. For years, I've driven my wife crazy with all the 'strays' I've brought home with me. After all, the last thing my house needs is a few more cubic feet devoted to kenneling old and abused computers. That being said, laptops present very unique opportunities. No matter what caused you or someone else to ditch that old laptop, there still may be some way to integrate it back into society. For every kind of laptop lemon, I've found that there's plenty of lemonade to be made."
Once you have finished making lemonade, be certain not to spill it on your newly-refurbished laptop.
... especially considering that these things decay rather rapidly. The notebook I bought a fortnight ago already stepped down Euro 199 heading rapidly towards the crap heap.
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
Woe to the players connecting to the resurrected old laptop for a game of UT2k4... Yikes!
--- "End Of Line" - MCP
Once we eliminate all sales men from using laptops they should be a lot safer.
Is it a question? Is it a statment? I am not sure what to reply.
That said... I have several old laptops and scoop them up when I get the chance. I have a couple dumb terminals running diskless terminal server clients... a couple playing mp3's. A simple ghostable one for installing *trial versions* of software I can then reghost and install when I need to.
Lots of good reasons to keep them.
Boredom's not a burden anyone should bear.
Another great use for laptops that are underpowered are as dumb wireless terminals. We have 10 laptops on our site (a public school) which we connect into a terminal server wirelessly and has given new life to laptops which would have just been thrown away.
Isn't most of this stuff a bit.. well.. obvious? The gist of the article appears to be "find a laptop with a small hard drive? upgrade it (through some unmentioned means of salvage from your friends who happen to have old laptop hard drives) or use things that don't require a lot of space!" and "have a laptop with a low resolution screen? run things that are low resolution!"
I mean, the suggestions as to what to run in which situation are helpful, but I like to think that if I were dealing with those problems, I'd be able to figure those solutions out as well.
Oh well, it killed a few minutes.
Schlock Mercenary
I found a great use for an old discarded 486 laptop running DOS. It is now dedicated to writing C64 disks thanks to my X1541 cable :-)
In my case a friend ditched one since it had a broken keyboard. I got it for free simple fix I just got one of those flexable mini keyboards it fits perfectly over the old keylayout. so I can use it without having to lug around a full size keyboard and have it hanging all over the place taking up space. plus its rollable to It doesnt take up a boatload of space in my laptop case.
Give them to some kid.
I got my interest in computer engineering from taking apart people's old junk. TVs, VCRs, computers, just about anything electro-mechanical.
If anything, i bet you can find a kid who would like to smash it up, but if you ask around, I am sure you can find a kid who would be interested in disecting it.
You never know, you could set some eager young mind on the path to a science or engineering career. And we can ALWAYS use more of us, especially as today's children drift farther and farther from science or engineering.
I've always been fascinated by the possibilities provided by old laptops...I mean, heck, you don't need a 2 GHz P4 laptop to wardrive, word process [ignoring the huge requirements of certain solutions...*cough* MSWord *cough* KOffice *cough*], code [note that I didn't say COMPILE!], act as an MP3 player [assuming you use a decent MP3 decoder, and not a piece of crap], or any of the lovely uses for laptops that people are now marketing in self-contained devices for several hundred dollars a pop.
Honestly, though, I'm curious where you're getting yours...neighbors and coworkers? Or is there some online stash somewhere that nobody told me about?
It's only an insult if it's not true.
One of my pet projects now is to turn a laptop, a cuecat and a webcam into a fridge computer that will allow me to inventory my refridgerator as well as take a snapshot whenever I open the door.
Imagine using a WAP-enabled phone to check what I have in the fridge at home. No more "do I have milk?".
Harald
plenty of lemonade to be made
Do what the Germans do, when life gives you lemons - burn them.
When my TI-99/4A died a few years back my little brother had fun with it for a bit... he destroyed it with a hammer.
Made me pretty mad but he had fun.
Get your Unix fortune now!
I second the use of an old laptop as a web server.
Using BSD, it's fast enough and there's not only the advantage of using a compact platform but also the fact that even with an old battery this also benefits as a poor man's UPS...
Trolling using another account since 2005.
Exactly how I feel! I've rescued a handful of laptops from my work place and rehabilited them thanks to ebay. $20 motherboard, and I have a working laptop! Missing cover? Where else but... ebay!
Have an old black and white television? Well, just use it to watch black and white movies, you won't notice the difference!
Damaged Display
Install Linux on it and make it into a server!
Tiny or Dead Hard Drive
Yep! Boot it from a CD and use it as a server!
Low Memory
A low memory server!
Dead Battery
plug it into a wall outlet and use it as a server!
Busted Keyboard or Touch Pad
Hook up a external keyboard and use it as a server!
Low Resolution Display
Servers dont need a display!
All of The Above?
Can you see where im going with this?
Conclusion
With a little imagination, just about any old piece of junk laptop can be a server!
"If your old laptop has a tiny hard drive, and by small I mean under 100 MB of space, you may or may not be able to upgrade it. Even if you can, you are certainly looking at no more than a gigabyte of space and will probably be making use of someone else's used drive."
I could see using Windows...Hell, I used Win95 0SR2 on a 166mhz ATT Globalyst without much of a hitch.....Slow for mp3s, but ran most of the web and IRC chat well enough for me.
But Windows aside, he never makes mention of distros like Knoppix or even Damn Small Linux (Isn't DSL like 50mb?)...You could easily run a distro off a Knoppix or Live CD....Wouldn't it be more useful to do this, as one gets a full-fledged OS with software to boot?
-thewldisntenuff
My MythTV HowTo
what a crap article. his answer to all the problems is make it into a server - yeah thanks captain obvious. dosshell and edit for a word processor - kill me now!
Unfortunately, no one can be told what my sig is...
Most of these older Toshibas can gotten for pretty cheap from eBay. The only drawback is that a good battery is quite expensive.
Here's some helpful links:
I got a free old gateway solo 1100, the batery AND the PMU that would let the battery charge are dead. so was the HDD, but after a quick swap of that and a 16bit wifi card i had laying arround. it was plugged into my car cigarete liter and happily wardriving. another laptop saved from the landfill!
Gone are the days when laptops took a significant step down in terms of performance. Now even discarded ones are pretty sweet so they tend to make very good servers for the at home tinkerer. If you've got the kind of space I've got you don't want to fill it with a full desktop machine. Heaven forbid adding a CRT monitor on top. I also recommend this if you're the one that's paying the electricity bill.
Completely dead. Everything broken:
Use it as a door stop.
Philip
Signatures are broken
I did just this when my 18 month old Toshiba Satellite Pro 3000 partially died making it useless for its primary purpose because the LCD backlight failed. I had only just replaced the battery because that had died and the case was made from a brittle plastic that left it prone to cracks and chipping. Basically, Toshiba isn't getting any more of my money, I bought an iBook G4 instead and it is coming up to 12 months old now and is in perfect condition despite the daily use that wrecked the Toshiba in a similar amount of time.
Anyway, the Tosh does have a few redeeming features, it has built in 10/100 ethernet fully supported under Linux, 1Ghz PIII CPU and a 20GB disc. With a new battery and no backlight it will run for over four hours without power so it made sense to make it a server. Currently it has an HP laserjet 1200 hanging off it, served with Samba to support printing from Windows, Linux and OS X, it has network shares (Samba and NFS), DNS (using dnsmasq, much easier to set up than bind), DHCP, squid web proxy (including wpad.dat configuration for automatic detection by IE and Firefox), IMAPS for serving e-mail with fetchmail to pull it down from my pop accounts, Openwebmail to allow me to send and receive mail from anywhere in the world using ipcheck to update my dyndns records so I don't have to remember my specific IP address, spamassassin to filter all the crap about viagra etc, and clamwin antivirus before mail ever hits a Windows box (yeah yeah, I shouldn't use Windows for e-mail and browsing, but I have thunderbird and firefox as defaults and I only really use Windows for games but it is still nice to feel I can read mail and browse a little with some level of safety).
Actually, now I feel less bothered about the £1500 the laptop cost me because with all it is now doing as a server I feel like I can get several more years use out of it. Although, compared with the £1000 the iBook cost I still think Toshiba blows.
In the end, setting up this machine as a server has been great experience, I have got it interacting with my heterogenous environment and it does a lot for such a little machine. Oh, and the lack of fan noise and small size is also a real bonus.
"I have the attention span of a strobe lit goldfish, please get to the point quickly!"
believe I RTFA!
I used to have a better sig but it broke.
Wouldn't it be healthier to develop the alcohol addiction instead? :)
Totally dead laptop
Strategically placed, it can serve as a doorstop
I've got it built into a custom plywood case with a 19" LCD, 4 drive RAID, tape backup and 100 disc CDR changer. I'm working on installing the 3 day battery backup and generator this week.
Now, could someone come help me? My legs are pinnned and crushed and I can't reach the remote.
I got a new laptop (IBM T42), it had everything I wanted except a floppy drive. Yes I know floppies are old and nobody uses them, however in my lab we still use them so I need a floppy drive. So I took my old laptop with a dedicated floppy drive, started sshd and on the new machine setup keychain (allows you to log in to ssh without passwords but still secure) and a put together a bash script. Now I have a floppy drive for the new machine and still the option to set the old machine up as a web server or some other odd application.
All of this was done just to save money on a usb floppy drive.
Use another server as the storage. If the controls (keyboard + mouse) work and the screen works, then you're sorted. If not, do a bit of electronics hacking and interface with the parallel port (believe me, a friend and I actually did this). LED's are a few pennies, and parport printer connectors a couple of pounds. The software is free, coz you are gonna write it, right?
laptop to server
no need to RTFA
must be slow news day (or 'article blows goats')
__ Someday, but not this morning, I'll finally learn to use the preview button.
Every use he lists is the same for any old computer except that it has a built in UPS. How is this cool? I mean, UPS's cost $50 and up. Old Laptop batteries don't last to much longer than a cheap UPS. And besides, most old laptops don't have stuff like ethernet jacks or have weird proprietary ports.
/.
This ain't worth the front page of
I was worried until I saw that FreeSCO stands for Free Cisco.
One of the three PCs on my desk is a laptop with a dead screen that works just fine with the monitor when I switch the KVM switch over to it, and keeps a couple of old Win95 apps alive; when we're done with them I'll probably turn it into a Linux server of some sort, but it's happy for now, or I may just use it as a printer server.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
In many cases the LCD-display's backlight just stops working (while the display remains dark the output is still slightly visible). Instead of buying a complete new expensive display you might want to check the SMD-fuse first. On my old laptop it was placed on the inverter board and was labeled "F1". I replaced it with a new fuse (not an SMD one but who cares ...) and the backlight worked again :-)
the article fails to mention how useful old laptops are as doorstops, frisbees' and anchors.
You tried your best, & you failed miserably,
The lesson is:
Never Try
Ancient laptops with no batteries make great serial terminals. You go out a buy a "null modem cable", or maybe you had a old one laying around from a external modem or something. Also known as laplink cables. Carefull! There are different types of serial cables, have the wrong one CAN/WILL damage a board!
I had a ancient 386 laptop. I installed DOS on it, and used Kermit as a terminal emulator to connect to a tty out I had on a serial port on my desktop.
Had that open to a terminal, and I could start programs on my X server from it, too!
Also great for all those servers. So that you don't have to waste a monitor and keyboard on all those servers you simply setup Lilo to boot up using the serial as the main tty interface. Simply have a cord hanging out of each server, or have the servers turned around backwards or something and go and plug the laptop into the server that you need to work on.
Nice for a secure setup! All gettys are disabled, except for serial cord. No ssh in or out. Only nessicary services would be needed. All administration you could ever want done you could do thru that serial terminal via the laptop.
I like it for the extra keyboard and screen it provides. Nice to IRC while playing games, I'll talk thru the boring parts.
I have a busted keyboard as well ... where did you get this mini keyboard from?
... does anyone know where to get Sony Vaio keyboards?
Of course ideally I'd like to find a "proper" spare part
what a pile of crap.
...and I know i may get flamed for this, but, I have about 25 'old' laptops, stacked in a few piles, in the corner of my office... They ARE my Beowulf cluster
None of them are particularly speedy, and half of them have cracked LCDs, but for what I'm using them for, they're fine
I've never shoed a horse, but I once told a donkey to piss off!
Rehabilitating Damaged Laptops Submitted by Lineman Sun, 10/03/2004 - 10:48 Hardware It breaks my heart to see a computer in need of a good home. For years, I've driven my wife crazy with all the "strays" I've brought home with me. After all, the last thing my house needs is a few more cubic feet devoted to kenneling old and abused computers. That being said, laptops present very unique opportunities. No matter what caused you or someone else to ditch that old laptop, there still may be some way to integrate it back into society. For every kind of laptop lemon, I've found that there's plenty of lemonade to be made. Damaged Display This has to be the most common laptop problem that I've seen, particularly among my own. Unfortunately, replacing a damaged LCD can easily end up costing more than a brand new laptop. Without a display, you can still make use of even a moderately old laptop as a Web server. Install some stripped-down version of Windows and install EasyPHP or just use Linux with MySQL and Apache and you'll soon have your own personal Web "sandbox." Since you don't need a graphics card for a game server, you could even run your own local or Internet Quake server. If the battery is still good, you even have a built-in UPS of sorts to keep your server from crashing during any short power outages. This may not sound like much of a benefit since you will lose power on everything else during power failure, but consider this: since you don't have to worry about it shutting down, you can stash it in a closet or on top of a shelf without worrying about physically rebooting it. Tiny or Dead Hard Drive If your old laptop has a tiny hard drive, and by small I mean under 100 MB of space, you may or may not be able to upgrade it. Even if you can, you are certainly looking at no more than a gigabyte of space and will probably be making use of someone else's used drive. Still worse, maybe the drive in your laptop is completely dead. Since we are talking about an older laptop in this case, we are fortunate because unlike newer models, older laptops almost always came with a built-in floppy drive. With a small drive, you might be able to squeeze an early edition of Windows 95 onto it (I've done this but it's painful). However, Windows 3.1 will comfortable fit on such a drive just fine. With a few floppy disks, you can install that and a compatible word processor from that era like Microsoft Works or Word Perfect. You now have a small and portable word processor to use while on the road or to write that novel you've secretly been working on. But what if the drive is dead or nonexistent? There's still hope. Some of you may not remember using computers before they had hard drives, but I can assure you that it is possible to get by without one on many tasks. You'll need to create a bootable DOS disk. If you aren't terribly familiar with DOS, you may want to make sure DOSSHELL is on it to help you navigate files without fumbling around on the command line. Once you've booted into DOS, you can use the built-in EDIT utility as a word processor. Once you have EDIT running, you can swap out the disk and use a second disk to store your documents on. You might even be able to install an older word processor on a third disk that you can load ofter booting that will have more functionality than DOS's EDIT. Low Memory If you find yourself with custody of a really old laptop, you may not have enough memory to do much of anything. Those of you who can still remember measuring memory in kilobytes can probably still appreciate how much of an issue RAM used to be. Maybe you have a laptop with only a few megabytes of memory and still refuse to throw it away like it's going to grow more RAM over time. What you can use such a system for hearkens back to the days when memory and drive space was such a premium that most computing was done with a single mainframe holding all the major resources and terminals were used to access them. If you have a Linux or BSD server on your network, you can share its resources by installing a very bare vers
This guy reminds me of an uncle of mine whose back yard is full of junk. Just because you CAN find a use for something doesn't mean that you've found a GOOD use for it. There comes a time when you need to toss stuff. Bending over backwards inventing uses for archaic hardware just so you can have an excuse to hold onto it just isn't rational.
I do agree that setting up a late model laptop with a cracked display as a server of some sort does make a lot of sense, asssuming of course you have need for such a server. But installing Win3.1 and wordperfect 6.0 on a 386 that's old enough for a bar mitzva is just plain crazy for anyone who has any means of getting anything better. Toss it!
Human beings are aquisitive. We like to get stuff and keep stuff. Some people don't seem to understand that there comes a point at which holding on to something is a detriment because it eats up resources without providing any genuine return. The resources I'm talking about are things like space, electricity, and the patience of your spouse. It is far, far better to periodically do an inventory and toss out stuff. If you don't have a legitimate use for it and aren't going to have a use for it, then get rid of it. If you can't stand the idea of throwing it into the landfill then take it down to goodwill. Just because its useless to you doesn't mean its useless to everyone. Not only will you have more space for new stuff, but you'll find that your state of mind will improve. Lets face it, having a yard, or a house, or even a room filled up with junk creates a problem. The junk takes up space, gets in the way, and is generally a pain, and yet you don't want to get rid of it for some reason. This creates stress. Get rid of the junk and get rid of the stress.
I used to collect computers. Not anymore. I ditch anything I can't put to good use. The only exception I've made is for my old Apple IIe that I've had since I was 12, and if it ever dies I'm ditching it too. Today I've got 2 PC's and an Ultra-10. Actually make that 3 PC's if you count my HTPC that's in the living room. I'm a lot happier now than I was back in my hoarding and pack-ratting days.
I think the author of this piece needs to throw some crap out. If his wife hasn't left him by now then someone need to tell the vatican because she needs to be cannonized as a saint.
Lee
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
Need a simple console emulator machine? run it on your main PC.
Need a MP3 player? run it on your main PC.
Need a word processor? run it on your main PC.
Need a server? run it on your main PC with VMWare or user-mode linux or whatsoever equivalent.
Don't need any of them? forget about it and throw the old laptop away, or maybe give it to some of your friends who wants it as some other usage.
That would be cheaper, considering that old laptops eat up your room space, and here in Seoul, every square feet of your apartment cost thousands of dollars.
Not to mention getting your room full of ancient machines, and the disk+fan noise you have to tolerate every day.
Leave.
;) )
(you can get fortune! just tell the judge how many laptops he has
Exercise caution when modding this message up: the author acts like a jerk when his karma is excellent.
Old laptops make really nice MP3 players. There's a nice DOS mp3 player called damp that even has support for alphanumeric LCD's.
Works great in the car too.
http://www.laptopparts.com/laptop-keyboard/sony-ke yboard.asp?series=VAIO
With prices low and available clock cycles high, why would someone waste their time/energy/space finding archaeic uses for these machines? Sure, I believe in recycle/reuse, I use old boxes for servers or play toys for the kids, but come on! Once it reaches a certain point it's time to say goodbye.
I don't know if this has been said, but the best way to get rid of strays is to do the e-bay thing. Seriously, there is always someone out there that is going to need bits of trivial parts, and you might be doing a service and earning a buck or two. For example, I busted a friends cd-rom connector, the person told me specificly that the floppy went in the right bay when it clearly did not. $50 or so odd bucks later I get a replacement with the right part. Ok, now I have a stray, but that's not the point. The point is it was cool I could find an exact match.
But so long as there is a useful application for a POStop, there is going to be someone in need of parts to make their very own frankentop.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
Worst. article. ever.
"Use it as a server"... wow, he actually made out of that sentence a whole article.
Yes, Ebay.
It's never too late to have a happy childhood.
Life is beautiful.
Disclaimer: I work for a company, but I don't speak for them.
If you're lucky it might even come with that "I was anihilated by Slashdot" crispy-burnt smell
Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.
I have a Compaq Contura 410c. Ancient little thing, 486 with 16 megs. Missing its screen, hard drive has bad sectors, keyboard sucks. Been my home firewall and primary dns server for years (though it's offline now; didn't pay the DSL bill, and not in any particular hurry to give the bastards at SBC any money). Was also doing MX duty for a while, but I moved that to another box.
:-)
Best uptime was a little past one year.
Assume I was drunk when I posted this.
Infecting those kids with an overload of tech-interest, making geeks of them and pushing them towards the edges of our technical frontiers, boldly going where no Geek has gone before ??
What's next, are you going to tell them to browse slashdot ?
Slashdot: stuff for news, nerds that matter, matter for news, stuff that nerd
Fix it up with glue and paste.
Fancy a server?
You can get a roll-up keyboard from here
-- If ignorance is bliss, why aren't there more happy people?
Not portable, but an old (P133, 96Mb RAM) toshi laptop which became all but useless for any meaningful work did, however, have a sound card and PCMCIA wi-fi fully supported by Linux 2.4.n. Add Music Player Daemon, samba, PHP and apache and connect via 1/8" stereo jack to your Hi-Fi. Then mount all your MP3's via samba, fire up the servers and use your new laptop or desktop system to set up playlists and pump your MP3's through your nice phat amp.
"Any similarity between the hooting of a million eager monkeys and Slashdot is purely coincidental." -THEFLASHMAN
... Until nobody wants it.
I've just finished installing minix on my Zenith supersport 286e. I found it under a house. But I now need a new power supply as I let the magic blue smoke out of the old one. The good news is that it is a fairly standard (as laptop PS units go) 16.5 V DC unit.
it is only after a long journey that you know the strength of the horse.
Most auto ECU tuning programs are DOS ,or very simple Windows programs,so a 486 or Pentium is plenty. Helps keep the good laptop safe, since the car one will be getting greasy and perhaps left in the car a time or two.
I am sure you can find a kid who would be interested in disecting it.
If you do find a kid wanting to disect it, be sure he is knowledgable in the care and feeding of the backlight. The tube has mecurey and uses high voltage. It's not the same as tearing apart an old C64.
The truth shall set you free!
I have an old TravelMate in good and even clean condition; the problem is that there are no modern ports on it!
There's no ether, no pcmcia, the serial is the old slow type of UART (top speed 9600? 19,200? I forgot), no usb, etc. It's got a floppy. The parallel port might be bidirectional; I haven't checked, yet. It's got a 14.4K internal modem.
It's also got a cute outboard trackball, and was designed to run Win95. My parents probably lost the install floppies a long time ago, though.
I'm thinking, my best hope for connectivity, without spending a lot for a docking station, is some sort of serial to ether dongle. But I'm not sure it'll even do that well. I don't want to run SLIP or PLIP unless there's an easy way to get a Windows box to do those at the other end, for compatibility reasons.
Any useful suggestions that don't involve spending real money?
Get off my launchpad!
1. Give them to the kids.
2. Use them as a dedicated DVD player.
3. Leave them in a drawer.
(Current count of laptops in the household: 8)
About 2 years ago I found in one of the closets at work an old VAIO PIII 600Mgz. /syspart:D /tempdrive:D to install a disk that is than removed and put in another machine. Just do winnt32 /? to read all about it).
I ask around and the boss said it is broken and Sony labs ask for more then a new VAIO to fix it. So I took it home. I work on it at nights before going to sleep.
The case was all broken and the keyboard popped out. When plugged into the power the light goes on but nothing happens. So I opened it up. I saw the CPU fan was dismantled, probably when it was dropped and the case broke. I changed the fun and connected it. Now the fan turns but still nothing happens. I played around with it for days (nights) by chance I changed the alternate-BIOS dipswitch and the screen comes to life. What? The BIOS was over-written how did that happen? I scraped up from the net some source code for a little program that I ran on a friend VAIO, to copy his BIOS, then to write the one on my machine. OK now I'm at the boot prompt. I see the HD is dead. I order 40g one from compgeeks.com. Mean while I take it all apart, glue up the case real nice. 80% of the screws where missing, so I go downtown to find some. The battery mechanism is broken. Ha, I fix it in place with Masking tape. The HD arrives. Now the VAIO has neither floppy nor CD. Easy, put the HD (with that 2.5 HD kit) in a desktop machine. Hatch a windows XP installation. (Hatch is when you do> winnt32
That's it the VAIO is working. And it is so nice it is half the weight from my wife's 700Mg Celeron Thinkpad. Feels faster and lasts x3 on a full battery.
Well not so good, my boss comes one day and ask where is that old laptop. I tell him I have it. He says he wants it back. Now, there is no way I'm going to give it back after all the work I put into it. We have a big fight about it. Finally he admits that he needs the power-supply so he can have one at home and one at work so he doesn't have to carry the power supply three meters to the elevator and back. I Juice up the VAIO for the last time. And bring him the PWSP.
It is sitting there with power for one go. It took me 14 month and I'm at a dead end. A new PWSP is $200 and it has to be specially ordered since they don't carry them any more. Well 2 month ago, I go to NY (a sad occasion I'm afraid) and I find on 14th st an Original VAIO PWSP for $40 . I now have Mandrake on my VAIO and I'm excited every time I use it. We have a special bond we're war-bodies. The only thing short of perfect is three keys missing on the keyboard: VBN. I can still press that little nipple below the key. One day I will carve these keys from wood.
Free life Boaz
No, they're not. The fans in them are extremely annoying.
I've been tearing apart old laptops (a bunch of stylistic 486 tablets without anything) for their backlights.
I left the backlights attached to the "plastic light diffusing thingys" that are behind the actual lcd.
I had a couple of (neon case lights) inverters (think it was for 6" tubes) that now power them pretty well. These things are bright, 1 is a bit overkill for a nightlight, you can read a book by the light of 2 panels from about 4'.
svc.com sells a bunch of case modding stuff, and their prices are good, although you will buy 10x more stuff than you intended.
Everything runs on 12V DC and is attached to a molex connector right now, but I'll be switching it to a wall wart eventually
Thinking of making a "backlight wall" or a "backlight lamp" once I have an enough (8?).
I'm sure there is some use for something like this in photography (i.e. even lighting), although the white is a bit harsh, though I could get some filters for that.
Sadly no pics, my dig cam is out of service for the next couple of weeks.
Anyone else doing something like this?
/I'm doped up on nyquil and sick as shit, so if something above doesn't make sense. . .
1q2w3e4r5t6y7u8i9o0pqawsedrftgthyjukilo;p'azsxdcf
I usually wait until there's a couple of broken laptops, and swap out bits of each of them to make one working laptop.
I have tonnes of spares for various HP Omnibook laptops, and old Toshiba Tecra/Satellites.
I am still using a P3 Omnibook XE3 which came to me in the form of one laptop with a broken screen and another laptop which had suffered severe internal coffee-related injuries.
I really appreciate his love for hardware. One day, just maybe, that old crappy laptop will be a collector's item. I hope he sells for for a motza on ebay in 2050 and posts a "told you so" on slashdot, for all you doubters out there (as long as he doesn't link it to a webpage running on said laptop)
Think of it as something to point friends-and-family to.
We'll be teaching Grandmothers to suck eggs.
I had a Dell sub-laptop give up the ghost a year ago, and it was nearly impossible to troubleshoot -- I basically gave up, replaced it, and have been trying to rehabilitate it as a hobby, but even that has been fruitless. Anything I did would result in bizarre hardware errors, even running Knoppix. I finally figured out that files in memory had errors -- and important config files were strewn with random characters (well, even more than usual) -- so I finally chalked it up to either bad RAM or a bad mobo. After all the time and money, it makes more sense just to junk it.
Conclusion: the toughest part about rehabilitating a (non-superficially) damaged laptop is determining if it's just damaged or completely dead.
Cheers,
IT
Power corrupts. PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.
I mean, who doesn't want to have a 1 Tb-harddrive in his PC? Why? To collect stuff ofcourse. Call it e-mail, MP3, the complete collection of all distributions from Linux-0.1 upto Linux-2.6. When do you use it? Never!
I guess we should just stick to 1 Mb drives and call it a day. 't-as been fun, but now we need to go back to real information.
Ofcourse, because we don't know what the real information is, we tend to stock up on it and dig through it later. It does make sense in way:
Isn't Google the biggest trashcollector in the information-universe ?
Slashdot: stuff for news, nerds that matter, matter for news, stuff that nerd
I have a ~2 year old, dead Toshiba Satellite lying around which I didn't want to throw away.
...
:)
..
Someone in my company managed to spill tea into it while it was running; careful cleaning and drying didn't help, and my electrical/soldering knowledge is unfortunately quite limited.
Has anyone been able to put such a thing to good use? From everything I've read, it seems to be at least difficult if not impossible because of the proprietary display electronic, but I'd hate to throw away a perfectly good panel
Being able to use this thing as a 14" digital picture frame would rock
Thanks in advance
Laptop battery, about $100 (depending)
144-pin sodimms $113.99/256 (costs may be higher for EDO or propriority memory)
16bit PC card ethernet adapter $30
WIFI to Ethernet Bridge $93 (in case you can't do cardbus)
Laptop DVD rom drive $50 on ebay.
Cost to make that laptop modern $386.99
Knowing you can from Walmart for $598 + tax with all that crap already, priceless.
Sure you can frankentop, just so long as you don't cross the bottom line.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
Most schools would be ecstatic to receive some refurbished old laptops (or desktops).
Plus, you would get a real life Karma bonus.
Is the author related to that guy in the Dell commercials that keeps using duct tape and twenty year old computers to do things? He'd probably love to get his hands on that fine laptop in the Dell commercial that comes with the gigantic hardshell case.
About 5 years ago I sold an old 68030 based Macintosh Powerbook on ebay. Before I did, I cleaned up the hard drive etc...
When I tested it, I was shocked. From OFF, not sleep, from off, it would boot and lauch Microsoft Word in 7 seconds.
Now that is impressive performance.
It was running MacOS 7.6.1 and Word 5.1. Both from the good old lean days.
We have certainly lost something since then.
Damn, I just bought a new laptop and this guy has told me about everything that can go wrong with it!!!
Hope i never have to use that article, ever.
Lord of the Binges.
Overstock.com has a few for $30 ($33 with shipping).
i recently got my first lappy, a p133 i paid $20 for because the screen spazzes out when tilted to certain positions. the only thing i could find under $100.
I wasn't using my PII-333 laptop anymore so I turned it into a digital picture frame.
But only of Microsoft products and old stuff, so I guess that makes it all right then.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
My boat anchor is a Zenith 180, with two (count 'em, two 720 KB floppy drives. Somehow, I don't think I want to route my traffic through the 2400 baud modem. (Eww! I just had an X.25 flashback!) Heck, I just barely managed to convince my wife that we need basic DSL.
"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." -- George Orwell
I just tore apart an old 100 Mhz Pentium laptop and installed Slackware on it.
I've got it set to run a slideshow using svgalib, so I don't even have X installed on the machine.
It pulls the photos off of my webserver and works great. It was an easy project and the results are great.
All that is left for me is to find a nice frame to put it in.
redune.com: The World 3.2 Megapixels at a time
I've got a 486/25SX with a 100MB drive. Runs Slackware 4 with X and FVWM.
Any old laptop down to about 486DX/33 will be perfectly usable as a homebuilt CNC controller running TurboCNC in DOS. Laptops are actually ideal for this because they don't take up much space, they already have a flat-panel monitor, and they are usually slightly more resistant to accidental thumps and vibration. You do need to have at least a DX, since TurboCNC relies on the math coprocessor. And the parallel port needs to work; it also may require a little buffering since laptop parallel ports can be low-voltage.
- http://www.toms.net/rb/
- floppy fw
dmoz also lists several: http://dmoz.org/Computers/Software/Operating_SystFree Google Secrets
Anyone got any pointers on how to convert a laptop display into a tv or monitor... rca, vga, s video inputs, etc? Or is this possible?
If the PC has network connectivity, install some Home Automation software in the laptop and VNC to control it. It can sit quietly in a closet and control your house.
I have a couple of laptops a tecra 520cdt and a satellite 4090 also a nec
The Nec is dead but has provided
a 32meg sodimm for the satellite a 400Mhz processor for my linux box and my worst system is now running at 333mhz using a cryrix m2 that came with the nec.
one day i will sell off the drives, keyboard, battery,mouse.
the 4090 came short a few pieces of plastic and no expansion memory
I have used phone e-topup cards to create a ram cover a hdbay cover and a retainer for the keyboard.
A Vhs video case was carefully cut down and now holds the battery in place.
The psu is the one from the tecra.
I decided i wanted the tecra running unfortunately the nec psu is too gutless
and too high a voltage for the toshiba to run from.
i had to modify a connector to fit the back of the tecra achieved by taking a dremell drill lead which had a similar coonector with a 2.5 mm dia hole in the end and drilling it out to 3mm (just enough metal to be successfull).
the over voltage of the nec it didnt like, and a hp printer psu was the right voltage but under powered (1 amp).
I finally thought of an old cb psu 13.8 volts, 3amp officially but measured as 14.1 took the dremmel lead and connected to that and now this powers the tecra.
I bought the 4090 with one aim in mind I have an adaptec videoh hardware mpegII encoder this now sits on the 4090 usb port and uses my wireless lan card to record mpegII streams to my my main system upstairs (nice and quietly)with realvnc I can remotely control the laptop from anywhere in the world,
The only thing i would like to impliment is remote control of my satellite and cable systems. via the laptop ir port but this seems to be impossible.
I would love to hear from anyone who has successfully used a laptop as a remote control for tv ect.
for case cracks ect I would like to suggest a hot glue gun this stuff is fantastic. I have even used it for holding the banisters to my stairs fantastic strength.
Blarney Quality Restaurant, Plants
Have an old black and white television? Well, just use it to watch black and white movies, you won't notice the difference!
If you thought that was funny, you'll probably enjoy Viz's "Top Tips". ('Top Tips' appears in the menu bar).
Typical example: "BUSY executives. Don't buy a Dachshund. Their amusing sausage shape means they take 50% longer to stroke than other dogs, and time is money."
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
The laptops that have touchpads present a special problem for rehibilitation after the 'dominent' operating system gives up.
/dev/sda1 /mnt/minolta_cam
/mnt/minolta_cam/dcim/* .
/dev/sda1 is the sccsi device to which Linux maps the flash part of the camera. Depending on your use of the USB facilities of the Linux box, the device may actually be different, something like /dev/sdb1 or perhaps /dev/sda2.
/proc/bus/usb in files there.
/dev/hda1 or /dev/hda2
/mnt/minolta_cam/dcim/*
/dev/sda1 /mnt/minolta_cam
/sbin/shutdown -h now
I loaded RH9 and had a major problem which I eventually solved. Not easy. So then I loaded Fedora Core 2, and the touch padd is all whacky again with no way to fix it.
I tried loading a touch screen driver but it needed to be built. As I hadn't loaded compilers, etc, to keep the install small, I was unable to build until I did this.
But the real solution for this Linux problem is to determine what I really want this for: To store my digital pictures when I am out photoing on a buetiful Fall day (or any day).
I do this day-tripping thing with my camera.
I use the notebook to cache the pictures.
The solution for my whacky mouse pad:
The easy way is to boot to a run-level that just gives a command line. Then the
sudo mount -t auto
command should work from this command line.
Then I create a new directory, cd to that, and then copy (with a persistence flag!) from the USB device (the camera) to the directory where I am as follows:
cp -p
The path to the pictures may be different, but it will be on the USB drive of the camera (it's memory card).
The -p is VERY important to preserve time stamps.
Funky until you learn about the way that Linux maps USB as sccsi. The information is cyptically included in the directory
sda1 means 'sccsi device A-1'
These mappings should be familiar to Linux users as mirroring the way that file systems deal with harddrive devices mapping them as
the sda devices map in the same way.
So, the notebook can be a very handy (and cheep) storage device for digital pictures for an software geek like myself.
I think that when I get to it I will not use the laptop anymore for this, but instead figure out a way to use VIO or such device that has a much larger harddrive than my notebook does.
The dumb thing about these hand held media players is that they don't let you mount another USB device from them to do file transfers. They will act just like external USB storage devices just like the camera does. However, they can't be used to control that other device. Pretty dumb for these. Makes them very weak as far as I can see.
If you run the notebook to a runlevel where Xwindows is not yet running, it will be much zipper to load the pictures from the camera.
When I am done loading the pictures (which usually takes about 10 minuetes for a 125Meg Flash card)
I then issue the following command to delete the pictures:
sudo rm
This deletes everything on the card right away so that I don't have to wait the long time the camera takes to do the same thing.
As I am doing commandline things I then umount the camera as follows:
sudo umount
or even
sudo umount
If you have a process with its current directory in a directory in the cameras file structure, the umount will not work. Then just type
cd
which will put you in your home (and not in the camera's file system).
Then do the umount.
Then I shut down as follows:
sudo
I haven't gotten the syspend mode to every work.
In conclusion: If I had the resources to buy what I want and whatever I want I would buy new equipment that does what I need and give t
Is FreeSCO okay on /. ? Only no one has mentioned this yet, so I'm thinking I must've fallen asleep for a year and SCO has, I dunno, collapsed and then been bought by RMS to become a drop in centre for crazed CEO's or something!
For me, any spare/obsolete laptop still in one piece and able to boot Win98SE gets turned into an extra screen using Maxivista. If it's damaged but still able to boot something and has a working screen, it will be turned into a digital picture frame. If the screen doesn't work, there's nothing that makes it better than all the other spare computers I already have.
I hate it when the commercial message seeps through my inner firewall.
.
.
It would be nice if this society weren't so addicted to trite repetition.
The style of your post may have been funny three years ago when those commercial's first hit, now it is trite and . .
Is this flame bait? Am I being dupped?
cost of hitting preview button?
My dignity. .
But I can't stop myself from being trite and flamming. . .
i dumped about a half a pint of pale ale over my thinkpad about a month ago--me, wife, and dog in a small room trying to unpack a large fouton frame. i have to give it to ibm, the keyboard basically works as a spill tray and hardly any beer made it through to the system board. at any rate 10.52 on ebay got me a replacement keyboard and a little isopropanol and it's back from the dead.
I recently inherited an obscure Dell laptop with a broken keyboard. It's a P3-633 with decent RAM and disk, but a new keyboard is $75, so I set it up with xvkbd on-screen keyboard. The keyboard starts when gdm starts, so as long as you don't need to leave X it works fine. Not a perfect solution, but it's the difference between a useless laptop and one that's at least usable.
(Assuming you have an old laptop that most of the parts are working.)
Get copies of:
1. all the hardware manuals for all your more modern systems. Particularly, get your mainboard manual, schematics for jumpering and cabling your hard drives and CD/DVD drives, and info on your network, video and sound cards.
2. lists of your bios beep codes, and other startup info if needed.
3. selected software documentation. (mostly for essential parts, such as the OS).
4. If you have any windows boxen, copies of system configuration info, particularly how Windows has assigned IRQs and DMAs, particularly on older systems, and a known good backup or two of the registry.
5. a list of URLs for your hardware and software manufacturers (optional - only really useful if you can get to the internet by some other means without having to lug this laptop to the public library or something just to connect)
These files, with an older OS, will typically come to a few hundred Mb or less. Set up the laptop with the aprropriate software to read them all (you'll probably just need a general text reader and maybe Adobe Acrobat reader for PDFs, not usually much else). Voila! Now when you lose LAN or internet connectivity, or the machine won't even boot right, you have a portable tech support library.
Who is John Cabal?
hey mentions pretty much all scenarios *except* the big one - if the power plug socket in the laptop is whacked. I've been trying to fix mine for ages (I'm no electrican), I can get it working for a week or so, but the soldier breaks everytime. (Its hard to do without frying the MOBO.)
I SURVIVED THE GREAT SLASHDOT BLACKOUT OF 2002!
I am using my old laptop to implaint into the brain of a cow who I have made into my slave and she gives me fresh milk without a refridge and all I have to do is think about it with the other laptop that I implainted in my head so that I can use the wireless connection between the two machines and it is typing this as I dream because it keeps rebootingg and I my whole life is like a bad run-on sentance . . .
I bought a used/broken laptop for parts(thinkpad) at a computer show (paid $15). I took it home and discovered the keyboard was broken. I replaced the keyboard and discovered the computer worked fine. I then discovered it belonged to a executive of a insurance firm in chicago. Their IT department had not cleaned the harddrive which contained inportant legal docs and also this guys personal information (he had his divorce and settlement information in some folders). Anyway I called their IT department and discribed the information on the HD..we traded..my $15 repaired laptop for a new think pad T40.. Man that was sweet!
A third hand P166/48M Omnibook is an overkill for standard office tasks with Linux, while it was almost unusable on Windows 95. Custom kernel, Slackware + X11 + Fluxbox = 17M only running. I changed the hard drive to 3 Gigs, added dual network/modem and CF card reader to PCMCIA. External ZIP on parallel, for backups. All of that cost me about 105 USD in total.
There you are, staring at me again.
I'm amazed I haven't seen this yet - old laptop, old CD's of of 1995 era video games, old joystick (maybe even a new one with an adapter), a wireless keyboard & mouse into the PS/2 port & an SVGA out port and cable.
.this also goes for Mechwarrior, Star Wars Dark Forces, Sam & Max, Full Throttle, Wolfenstein 3D, or any other pre Win95 videogame. And even some of the Win95 videogames can run with a little tenacity.
. . and . . Duke Nukem 3D lives on a new console machine!
.
I got tired of keeping big rusting hulk Pentium boxes around just to play the videogames I still enjoy, and my wife no longer argues with me about how loud, large, and ugly they are in our family room.
The bezel surrounding the LCD on my TiBook has split (thanks, stuck hinge!). Can anyone recommend something to glue it back together?
It's a stress point, but it was glued at the factory so it must be possible.
I use Macs to up my productivity, so up yours Microsoft!
"Let's say you've got a laptop where just about everything has gone wrong: the display is broken, the processor is slow, the battery is dead, there's no hard drive, and the keyboard been eaten by mice. I've still got a job that your laptop can handle."
Wow... Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these!
Offtopic, Inflammatory, Inappropriate, Illegal, or Offensive comments might be moderated up.
I work at a library, where we have fairly comprehensive tech support availible to students. One thing we see a lot of is dead floppy disks. Over the summer, a student came to me with a dead disk containing his thesis. I put it in my laptop, a PI 166 running Slackware (Which is now damaged, and will be rehabilitated, because I love that thing, but that's not the point of the story!) and got most of his document back.
At the end of the summer, that student (I'll call him Mel, because that was his name*) gave an old 486-based Toshiba to my boss for some reason. So we were like, "You know...this thing is running Windows 95. The Win95 version of scandisk.exe will often fix floppy disks that Windows XP and the like won't read..." So now that laptop lives on, as the "The Mel's Thesis Memorial Laptop", in honor of the pseudo-irony of its provenance, whose sole purpose in life is to run scandisk on students 'dead' floppy disks, and actually fix them most of the time!
* Ok, it wasn't.
"These people look deep within my soul and assign me a number based on the order in which I joined" --Homer re:
I guess this is sorta geared to laptops but they are just computers and the linux community has always been doing this. I remember reading the first FAQ proclaiming that I could turn my 386 into a "workstation". We've always made use of old hardware. Weve always made routers and terminals and webservers outta 'junk'. Kinda different now that you can just but easy to use 'routers' from Best Buy but before that we were still masq'ing like crazy.
I have an old pentium laptop that I was going to remake into a car PC. I took everything apart and haven't done a thing with it since...
---
Those who can, do
Those who can't, teach
Those who don't know how, supervise
My satellite internet connection needs a Windoze PC. Instead of dealing with this on my main PC, I use a stripped-down HP Pentium-II laptop as a router and small file server.
The top half with the screen is completely *gone*, and there's no battery, no floppy or CD. It's small, low-power, quiet, and gets the job done perfectly.
I also have a complete unit of the same kind, which I use with a wireless NIC. Opera and Firefox run great on it, and it's lighter, uses less power, and lasts much longer on its battery than the Toshiba Phatnote I have from work.
My house is off-grid (solar power and generator backup.) As a result, I tend to watch every KWhr more closely than the average technocrat, but the same concept applies elsewhere...
FIXME: Add a sig here
For the longest time, I have been wanting to create C64 floppies on my P3 (which has a 5¼" floppy drive that I added) in order to play them on my Commodore 64. Any ideas on where to begin? Thanks.
P.S. I prefer playing on the original consoles / systems rather than emulators. Emulation just never does justice to the old games.
Thanks! Unfortunately I can't see my (european) model on there (PCG-F305) and anyway, $135 is a bit on the steep side seeing as they're reconditioned and only have a 90 day warranty.
Thanks very much for the link though.
Thanks - that looks the best bet so far.
I just got myself some Torx screwdriver heads at lunch time to fix a flickering iBook screen. It's not the dodgy screen hinge problem, but the more obscure video chip flexing out of the MB problem...
Now to invoke my Google-fu powers to find the page that described exactly how to fix the problem.
Anyone know what i'm talking about?
You need to connect a c64 drive to your machine, see http://sta.c64.org/xe1541.html
I have a REALLY old laptop that is still in pretty good condition except that the battery is dead (have to use it with the AC adapter). It has a 386sx processor, 5 MB of RAM, and a 40 MB hard drive. It's currently running Windows 3.11.
Can I do anything useful with this? Someone suggested using Knoppix to make it into an MP3 player, which sounds interesting, but the minimum requirements of Knoppix are beyond this machine. I keep telling the kids that they should use this laptop to write school papers, etc. but they want to use the newer machines in the house so they can simultaneously chat via MSN Messenger while doing their homework.
For just pennies a day, we can end the suffering.
....is whipping around the corner with a SCO lawyer - they might actually have a legitimate claim this time.
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
Bah. The amount of mercury is negligible (older people here still remember the times when mercury balls from a broken thermometer weren't a reason to evacuate a school and call hazmat team but to go on knees and hunt them together with a piece of paper, and we didn't grow two heads from that), the high voltage in the invertor is at most unpleasant (which, as a bonus, is a nice and quite safe way to teach them how to respect invertors - from experience I can say the kick from a laptop backlight is FAR more pleasant than what an ignition coil does (ouch)).
There's a difference between "reasonable amount of risk" and "safety hysteria".
I'd be somehow more concerned about the AC part of the power supply.
While I'm getting into the reply game kind of late, I'd like to point out that I took an old Compaq laptop and turned it into a Linux-based wireless AP running the NoCat software.
It's now functioning as a Personal Telco Project node, one of over a hundred in the Portland metro area.
I've had the node running for over 160 days now without a reboot. I know some hardcore and knowledgable wireless enthusiasts turn their noses up at setups like mine because they think it's unstable but I'm here to say it's not. That being said, the node is not super high-use. YMMV.
http://wiki.personaltelco.net/index.cgi/Node172
Exocet Industries - Taking over the world, one computer at a
No, but you do get a tall frosty glass of failure! Go on and drink it, eater of cat poop! You Deserve it!
I have a Dell C600 laptop mobo bought off ebay because it had a snapped off power port. I did some soldering and managed to get it to run from within a dock. Now it functions as a DistCC node on my network.
I still have my old notebook running Windows 95 OSR2 that still works. It only has 32 MB of RAM. I mainly use it to test parallel, serial, etc. connections. That's about it. Any suggestions what I could use it for without removing and changing the hardware?
Probably too slow for the newer Linux distributions.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
What I would really rather see with a few old laptops I have - is portable dvd players. Remove the screen, mount it in your vehicle and play DVDs. Much cheaper than the 500 players.
I'd be somehow more concerned about the AC part of the power supply.
Most kids that take things apart know enough to expect high voltage in external sealed and marked power supplies. They might not know high voltage is lurking in the display and may assume it's low voltage LED's that light the display. They might appreciate a warning that it may bite. The lamp connections or inverter are not always well labeled as high voltage.
The truth shall set you free!
They should be able to recognize a fluorescent tube.
They might appreciate a warning that it may bite.
That's true. However, a small, reasonably painful lesson that high voltage may lurk in unexpected unmarked places even in otherwise low-voltage electronics, may save them from a more painful (and costly) experience in the future. :)
It's not really thin, either. Quite thick and syrupy, usually.
Has anyone considered turning an old laptop into a mythtv box? I suspect the NTSC ports on most would be inadequate and the hdd to small, but they do make USB tuners. It sure would fit nicely into the stereo cabinet.
I use an old 166 MHz Compaq Armada 7730 as an ebook reader. The 12 inch display is much better than a pda. I'm running 98 on it and can view pdf and chm files just fine. An even older machine would be good enough for text files like those from Project Gutenberg.
I rehabed a Dell Inspiron 4100 into a tivo-type unit. It's great in almost all respects: low noise, low power, built-in battery backup, even a built-in ir reciever. I got around the small harddrive by streaming video over 100 mb ethernet from my desktop in the other room. The recording has to be done elsewhere, although the mythTv frontend/backend pieces make this pretty straightforward. It isn't a bad life for a laptop. Most of the integrated hardware is put to work, plus it is nice and small.
Use the Firehose to mod down Second Life stories!
...without even looking at any other threads (cause I know 100,000 geeks have also done this)
http://www.corvairproject.com/powerframe
...18...19...20 Submit
When I was in college, my hard drive failed, and the guy across the way pointed me toward Minuet as a fully functional tool to use ftp, telnet, and whatever else right off a floppy drive. it turned out to work quite well for the three days, alleiviating a serious internet jonesing fit. it even had a semi-capable graphical browser. needless to say, there are tons of old dos utilities that you can throw on a dos boot disk and utilize without the need for a hard drive, if all you do is browse the web (sans caching) and send email. http://www.eiu.edu/~philos/retro/dos/internet.htm
"when the sun sets on the ghetto, all the broken stuff gets cold"
I still use an old 486 Thinkpad (12.28 mflops/12 MB Ram/250MB HD :-) running DOS and Win3.11 with Calmira Desktop that looks like a *fast* Version of Win95. But mostly i use it to play Elite2in DOS, because that game runs faster on the old Laptop than on my 1.1GHz Desktop running dosemu.
And Elite2 even looks better on that old greyscale LCD - perhaphs because the poor response time makes the graphics very smooth looking.
I also have been running NetBSD with a 16Bit WLan card, but running something that complicated makes the Laptop rather slow - so i'll stick to my DOS games and the fastest M$ OS available - and i have still much space left on the drive for more of the game classics i own.
Look, this thing is totally safe! Built it myself, you know. You just press that button like this and then turn that lev
Those are some fantastic ideas, but I still don't know what to do with a Compaq-gone-HP Presario 1694 with a fried motherboard. Doorstop? Bookend?
I've got a Sat Pro 4340 as my main desktop machine now. Few months back the screen started to flicker so I took it in for repair. Dumped $230 worth of labour and a 15 dollar part into it for it to work for 2 months. Then the screen died completely.
Instead of trying to fix it, I just attached a monitor, keyboard and mouse - and voila. Ultra quiet desktop machine.
I'll use it until it dies most likely. Which shouldn;t be too far off since the battery is dead - and so is the connection for the battery to the mainboard.
It'd be gone too if it wasn't for the 20GB drive and PIII 600 proc sitting inside her.
"Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality." -Jules de Gautier
Even though it's old, I'd love to still get some kind of functionality from my old Fujitsu LifeBook 270DX. But none of the suggested ways to make "lemonade" will work on mine, because when it gave up the ghost, it really went down hard. Something in the video hardware went so awry that the machine won't boot at all -- it just goes immediately to a "your system is fried and you now have a fairly expensive doorstop" message. (Not in those words, of course.) I haven't looked at it in months, but I know I spent many, many hours trying to find a way past that. No luck, even after doing what "should" have disabled the display (i.e., to use a remote display). :-(
No Laughing Allowed!
There are a few ways to go about this. First, it should be trivial to get Windows to act as a dialup server. (Cpanel, Add/Remove, windows components..) Typing RING on the other end of the serial line should do the trick.
If the stock dialup server doesn't do the trick, try Cygwin and run a real getty process. Installing bash will also get you a real shell on the main box.
Put a pair of real modems between the ends and exceed the 50' distance limit of RS232. Better yet, snag a pair of Ricochet modems from eBay and go 2,000' on the stock antennae. That's sure to impress the hell out of the neighborhood WLAN kids with their puny milliwatt gear.
Assuming the serial port is too slow for anything practical, you should look into the Xircom PE3 series of "pocket ethernet" adapters. They work on any type of parallel port, though bidirectional ports offer higher throughput. I have both the 10base-2 and 10base-T version, and I'd be happy to see either one go to a good home, if you're serious about resurrecting that machine.
If networking is out, a functional machine of that vintage is still useful as a standalone box. Someone else mentioned mapping software, but I've found that DeLorme Street Atlas will drag a 300MHz machine to a crawl. Maybe the NatGeo stuff is faster? Most non-mapping GPS apps are pretty lightweight, and even a tiny drive is plenty for most data acquisition and logging tasks. Does the battery hold a charge?
If it has sound capability, something like MidiNotate might be worth a look. Your neighborhood band student can open the machine sideways like a book. It'll listen to them play the music, and turn the "pages" for them as they get through the piece. I was unable to find any hardware requirements, so CPU might be a limiting factor there, but considering that Voice Blaster ran on a 486, you should be fine.
If all else fails, get one of those big-font programs for DOS and let the kids use it as a messageboard for communicating with other vehicles on roadtrips.
I hope this gives you some ideas not mentioned in TFA, which was admittedly a bit narrow in focus. Also please keep in mind that fluorescent backlight tubes contain mercury and there might be a Ni-Cd battery on the motherboard, so laptops should be recycled whenever possible.
I have an old Fujitsu 266mhz laptop lying around and I've been trying to figure out something to do with it. The problem is the LCD does not work and when I tried to use an extra monitor I have it wouldn't work. I'm thinking I need to dig a little further. Any ideas on how I can get this thing to display?
How can something that has not been rated be overrated? :)
OK, Dr. Lappenstein. Scream less and rejoice a bit quiter. Then, your wife won't be so crazy when you resurrect more laptops, heheh
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
I just picked up a broken laptop from an auction. The screen is shattered, but the rest of the hardware works just fine. I installed Fedora Core 2 on it and set it up to host my website. I use SMB and SSH to take care of anything else that needs to be done. Got the whole thing including a working battery, which I used for another system, for us$5.00.
Done it many a time. I actually had a public Descent 3 game going on Linux on... a 486/66MHz laptop with 12MB of RAM, 256-color VGA display, 1GB HDD (out of an old Mac laptop) and a PCMCIA netcard. The funny part its it actually worked, with a 2-player games pings were decent (100) although they spiked to 200-500 with a 6 player game. The people in the game went "WTF?" when I told them what they were playing on :-)
I tried to look at the article but it's already slashdotted. Looks like the site is hosted on one of those spare-laptop servers... *ducks*
perl -e 'print $i=pack(c5, (41*2), sqrt(7056), (unpack(c,H)-2), oct(115), 10);'
...from the looks of things, his favorite use is to bring them back to life in order to host his web site:
:-P
"Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock' (11)"
"Creativity is allowing ones self to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep" - Scott Adams
Funny, my senior year (last year) at IMSA (http://www.imsa.edu/) we literally had a section of the Old Caf corded off with hazmat dudes hunting down mercury that dripped from a turned-over barometer. So dumb... its mercury salts that are poisonous... (hence the "mad hatters"), not mercury, *sigh*
For the past 20 years I have taken old machines and given them to disabled children and adults here in Washington State. Some of you that have a couple minutes extra once in awhile, maybe you can do something like this in your nationhood. These are people whom would not be able to afford any type of computer. It doesn't change the sales base for you computer shop owners. You also feel good about yourself when you see the sparkling eyes of a child with a computer to do school work on.
It's interesting that recent research has found a distinct signature in the brain of hoarders: an inactive cingulate gyru. Contrary to assumption, it's totally distinct from obsessive compulsive disorder.
"Give a man a fish and he will ask for tartar sauce and French fries!"
When the screen on my 4 year old fujitsu finally dies it's going to become a server.
I'll get some external firewire enclosures so i strap a bunch of storage to it. It's got wireless networking and enough cpu power to handle most tasks very capabably.
Plus it's quiet, low power and since it's wireless i can hide it somewhere to avoid it counting towards the wife's computer limit.
Google's Cache of the page
Movie News - "Entertainment news, bitch!"
I'm the process of transforming a old laptop into a mobile network troubleshooter.
Ethereal and etherape being the to main tools I'm going to use.
Any suggestions for other fedora core copatiable netowrk tools.
Well... the concern here is probably the mercury vapors. When the ambient temperature is high, at least. And even that not too much.
Metallic mercury risk is only in the vapors; and, when ingested, it causes violent diarrhea. (It's not entirely friendly material, but no cause of fear, at least unless combined with liability lawyers and clueless jury. Which could explain the hazmat dudes. The threat of lawyers often leads to irrational behavior.)
The salts are dangerous when they are soluble. Calomel is quite harmless, in comparison with soluble mercury(II) chloride. (A better example here is barium, which is very toxic, and barium sulphide, which is commonly used as x-ray contrast stuff in medicine, and is nontoxic because its extremely low solubility.) The real bitch, however, are organic mercury compounds, eg. dimethyl mercury, which - in combination with fishing industry - can lead to whole villages being affected (see Minamata Disease).
We've found that releasing laptops from the 4th floor of our dorm to be highly enjoyable. That goes for old TV's, laser printers (the old 75+ pound variety), monitors and most any other large equipment or furniture.
I suppose this doesn't integrate the equipment back into society, but it does get it well on its way to integrating back with mother nature.
I built my Beowulf so I could learn how to do it.
Once my curiosity was sated it sat unpowered in the basement... until the day it fell over and nearly killed me! Then the pieces went back to the recyling bin they came from, wi' a curse.
I doubt the recyclers will get a lot of useful parts out of a huge pile of dented Pentium-233s with (probably crashed) 500MB hard drives, but you never know.
I think it'd be overly optimistic to build a good cluster without building a low-cost one first.
I say, Use it while you have it. In a few hundred years it'll all be gone, and Soylent Green is always aplenty.
File server? Check out prices of 120G laptop drives vs. 120G desktop drives. Nup.
I know they make 2.5" -> 3.5" converters so you can use laptop drives in a desktop system with IDE channels. It would make sense that you can go the other way... it just would be a bit messy (maybe mount the 3.5" drive where the battery or floppy was? Each has a tradeoff...) Aside from that, it's just an issue of powering an IDE drive. You would need to derive both 12v and 5v power sources from the input power, which could be done with some basic electronic skills...
I have two old laptops (P2 333) lying around for emergency situations. For example, when my friend's room flooded and her computer destroyed she used one of my crappy backup systems for a month or so while finding a bargain laptop on eBay to replace hers. And since she got used to Linux on my laptop she started using Linux regularly too! =) Since then that laptop has been used quite a lot by myself or my friends when our computers are in the shop, and the other one has been circulating between international students from Eastern Europe who could not afford laptops.
read the bunni comic
Or... could it be the c-word should be used in a different sense? Surely Our Author wouldn't be suggesting we use an improperly licensed copy of Windows on our worthless old broken-down laptops? Well, he's cracked enough to suggest using Windows one way or the other, so I guess it could be. Stunningly stupid, but not impossible. Come to think of it, he fits right in with the rest of the slash herd.
News for herds. No matter.
In my experience though, most also know better than to dissect something while it's still plugged in, turned on and lit. (Unlike CRTs, none of the CCFL inverters I've seen retain any significant amounts of charge when not powered. Poin-n-shoot 35mm cameras on the other hand...wish I knew that when I was 10, youch!)
Caveat Emptor is not a business model.
Excellent response. Thanks for the help!
Get off my launchpad!
had a laptop that was a write-off by the company because it was dropped down a flight of stairs by a salesperson - or so they claimed. It suffered some case damage (scratches and a dent or three), would not power on, and the dvd drive's drawer was extended or somehow opened and had been broken off. The missing part never made it back to the office.
We sent it away for an estimate - estimate claimed a new main board and a new optical drive were required and cost was somewhere around $1250 CDN. Too much since a new notebook could be bought for the same and have a better processor and remain under warranty. We paid the estimate cost, took the laptop back and wrote it off.
On disassembly I could see that the power switch was a surface mount push button that would normally sit at a right angle to the main board and had two small plastic tabs that clipped into a small metal bracket. The tabs were broken so anytime you puch the plastic power button it would just move the switch back but not be enough to close the contacts. I set the switch upright as it should be, took a resistor with it's extended leads and pushed the resistor's leads through the holes in the bracked and then twisted them together. The switch now could be pressed by the plastic button on the case and the notebook could be powered up. So far, so good - all is working.
The drive was a different story. No way was I going to buy a new one at $300 but I found one used for $80 CDN (a buck or two in "real money") The challenges were that to set master/slave on slimline drives you make changes in the firmware. I could not find the tools to do this. After much research and looking a late night thought occurred. Why not remove the interface board from the old drive assemble and swap it with the internal interface in the new one? The drives were the same models but different versions of firmware. The bigger question - did I keep the old destroyed drive and after some looking around I found it. Disassembled both slim DVD drives, swapped the internal circuit board, installed the replacement modified DVD to the notebook and powered it on. Where the notebook previously complained of an IDE #1 error now I saw the company logo and the notebook was fully functional. A final reassembly and the notebook works just as you'd expect. Other than the few marks on it and the different bezel color on the DVD drive (it was from a Dell notebook and was brown, the laptop is kinda grey-blue it appears to be in good condition.
I would not think all notebooks are repairable since they are all or most of them very much customized with very specific parts that are different even with product lines but so far I've had a good experience and ended up with an almost free laptop. Pretty sweet deal I think.
Don't know if anyone will need this, but I used to work at a company that has a service that makes it easier to find spare parts. You can access it by going to www.itpartshopper.com and type the part number into the search.
It would appear that you are a monkey fScker.