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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."
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.
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.
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
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!
"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
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!"
you could set some eager young mind on the path to a science or engineering career. And we can ALWAYS use more of us
Then perhaps we should give our old laptops to kids in India.
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 :-)
...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!
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!
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
not only obvious but extremely shallow.
"if it has a vga port you can use a capture card to put it on the tv."
HUH??
and he goes on talking about extremely basic things.
How about actually rebuilding the laptops? I've snagged dead laptops by the palletfull before and simply take them apart and replace cracked screens with working screens (need a number of the same model, easy to get from corperate auctions)
upgrading the hard drive can usualy be done, flashing the bios is the first step and there is still copies of the dreaded drive management software out there to force a large drive to work on a old machine.
Finally, the best thing is to put in a CF card caddy in the hard drive slot and add a CF card as the drive for unitask laptops. I did this with about 10 of them and set them up for the local ham radio group. write protect the CF card (if it has that switch) and use it as an appliance. works great for their packet radio, turn it on and it boots into their software.
Finally upgrades are possible. the Dell Lattitude Cpi's were very modular for almost 2 years of manufacturing. I upgraded my daughter's laptop from a P-II 266 to a P-II 400 by simply moving the procerssor module from the dead laptop to her's.
Personally, the only good old laptop to hold onto is the tandy 100 and any of the early toughbooks.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
or any of the lovely uses for laptops that people are now marketing in self-contained devices for several hundred dollars a pop.
My main older laptop applications are MIDI piano teacher and GPS Map display.
Many newer laptops have gone to firewire, USB, & Ethernet and have eliminated older ports such as RS-232 and a Joystick port with MPU-401. Many new laptops have no place to connect a MIDI device.
Doing piano lessons with the laptop right above the keyboard on a stand puts in in the right place. Seldom will a desktop PC work well in a music setting for lessons. (Voyetra Piano Tutor and The Piano Discovery System)
A TOPO map on a laptop connected to a GPS receiver sure beats the small display on a hand held GPS for off road adventures. (Natonal Geographic Off-Road Explorer)
In both of the above applications, the MS security holes in old versions (Win 95) are not a problem. There is no net connection to exploit.
The truth shall set you free!
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. . .
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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.
Actually, I use a laptop with a busted monitor as a router and web/ftp/smb/mysql-server. Runs great.
^^
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
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.
I used to suffer from computer packrat bulimia. I would collect a lot of comuter hardware (much of it old/obsolete) then every so often "purge" everything except the newest machines and start over. That is, until I revived an old 286... It dual-booted msdog/windoze 3.0 and minix. The minix install had a web server that I turned into a remote control for an mp3 player (on a different box, of course.)
So, get this... you had to have a machine with a web browser to see the web page on the 286 minix box so that you could control the mp3 player on 266Mhz linux box, which, of course, was fully capable of running its own web server... The 286 was completely uncessary in the setup, and dramatically slowed everything down. I set up the minix box to prove it could be done, rather than because it was a good idea. The same goes for the caseless 386dx25 I mangled into a NAT/firewall. It used a pair of 8-bit Eagle NE1000 10-base2 cards and was thus incapable of routing a full-speed broadband connection. What's the point in that? I don't know...
So, another purge, and anything slower than a 500Mhz box was sold or tossed. You might call it a hobby. I'd prefer to call it an addiction. With the low cost of wireless access points, print servers, firewalls, and external storage, I find it just isn't worth my time to try and make older machines do anything usefull anymore. If you have anything slower than a Pentium II, toss it. Go buy your self a $60 d-link or linksys appliance, put it in the corner, and forget about it. Less space, less noise, less hassle. If you really feel the need set up your own server, get a decent enough box to run your firewall, web server, dhcp server, http proxy, ltsp server, samba server, etc. etc. and do everything on one box. You still get to learn how it all works, and you won't have to wade through 15 boxes of rubbish and fight off the spaghetti cable monster each time you want to enjoy your hobby.
Check out the refurb section of pricewatch or ebay for some great deals. $100 will buy you a decent enough box. Then again, you could probably get something similar from your next door neighbor who is about to throw a perfectly useable (and not completely obsolete) machine in the dumpster.
Trust me. If it's not at least a Pentium II (or equivalent) don't waste your time.
Booting a broken 386 off floppies and word processing with dos edit??? Oh, god, that man needs help...
As Weird Al said: "What kind of chip you got in there, a Dorito? Throw that junk away, man, it's an antique!"
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 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.
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:
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
It's not so much that he has a hobby, it's that he's pretending he's getting super-useful cool machines out of it when that really isn't the case.
If you can't see the value in jet powered ants you should turn in your nerd card. - Dunbal (464142)
I've carried my AcerNote on 14-hour train and 21-hour bus journeys up and down Iran, probably somewhere aroung 6000 miles in total, all the time stuffed at the bottom of my boardcase, in temperatures ranging from five to forty-five degrees (C) and with humidity ranging from desert to jungle. I wouldn't have dared to take a new laptop with me, but the old Pentium 133 was fine. Probably it survived all sorts of rough treatment, including being shoved around by Iranian customs officials, specifically because I could afford to lose it. Had I taken my work laptop down there, it would've been broken after three days, probably.
Same thing now: I've spent five months in Uzbekistan with an old IBM Thinkpad T20. It's light, comparatively rugged, specifically not brand new, and it does all it's supposed to do. And it survived working at temperatures from minus five to plus forty-five degrees as well as journeys on overland buses and the good old Soviet railway.
Moral: Always keep a couple of older laptops around, you never know when they'll come in handy ;)
As a state gets corrupt, its laws multiply; the most corrupt states have the most numerous laws. (Tacitus, Annales 3:27)
You're right about hobbies. But this was not presented as a hobby. It was presented as practical.
Read my blog: HansMast.com