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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."
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.
Internet 'fridges have been for sale in South Korea for two years. They scan for outdated or recalled products, such as expired babyfood, and send email if they suffer an outage that may generate spoiled food.
The idea is that the kitchen is the new center of the house, and why not use the surface of the refer to house a LCD and internet connection. Anything specific to cooled contents manifest is just a bonus.
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.
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...
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