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."

Comments

toshiba satellites make great webservers

['Aikanaka]

I've had great success using an old Toshiba Satellite Pro 410CDS (Pentium) with a half-dead screen & no CD drive as a Linux based, multi-purpose server. I used my "damaged laptop" to run my personal web and SMTP/POP servers for over two years (until I upgraded to a PIII 600Mhz machine). It only had an 800MB hard drive and about 64MB of RAM, but it still hummed along just fine. Of course, I never submitted it to a slashdotting :) ---

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:

• http://www.linux-laptop.net/toshiba.html
• http://www.buzzard.org.uk/toshiba/
• http://www.networkcomputing.com/unixworld/tutorial /012/012.html