Slashdot Mirror
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.
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
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!
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:
Makes sense. A dying laptop needs a dying operating system. *BSD and laptops are meant for each other!
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!"
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.
"The notebook I bought a fortnight ago already stepped down Euro 199 heading rapidly towards the crap heap."
And the crap heap thanks you for your quick turnover of modern technology. I haven't paid for any of my laptops.
Oddly Draconis
Too cynical to live, too stubborn to die.
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!
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.
Life is beautiful.
Disclaimer: I work for a company, but I don't speak for them.
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?
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
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 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 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.
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.
Heh, back when I was in school, that was a major source of junk hardware. Schools *don't* want your old junk. They would "break the rules" and let me haul it away for them because they had no use for it all.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
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
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 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?
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
You need to connect a c64 drive to your machine, see http://sta.c64.org/xe1541.html
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.
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).