Broken laptop screen...

digitalscream

...but who cares? My daughter has, over the last two years, brutalised her laptop. She broke the battery catch, so it was held in by gig tape. She dropped it while it was running several times, destroying the hard drive and over time has ruined the cable for the screen so it kept flickering...eventually, it gave up completely.

Now, I hate chucking stuff out, so I took it apart to see what I could do with it. Turns out a replacement cable would be about £40 - can't be bothered with that, so I built her a gaming desktop out of spares I had kicking around. That still left the question of what to do with the laptop...

I've been getting a bit narked by the slowness of the Raspberry Pi we use as a media centre downstairs. While I was mucking around in the laptop's innards, it looked pretty easy to remove the screen hinges...so I took the screen off entirely, installed XBMC on it and now we have a pretty damn quick media centre (it's a Core i3 with 4GB RAM and a 500GB drive). Works like a charm, and it's a total breath of fresh air compared with the clunkiness of the Raspberry Pi. Also, with its gigabit network port I can transfer stuff to it at around 40MB/s (the maximum speed of the hard drive), which makes life a lot easier.

So...don't chuck out that knackered laptop. Anyone else put broken laptops to good use?

Danny1969

I have a Dell XPS with no screen hooked up via HDMI to my TV. I use it for everything and much prefer the control it gives you with a wireless mouse and keyboard. Having to use an Xbox and controller for TV work is barbaric in comparison

Deadman

I replaced the screen on my daughter's Lenovo i5 lappy. It was a piece of cake, cheap and I was her hero afterwards. Winner.

Skipped

A year ago I did something really stupid.
Instead of wiping the screen on my (cheap from Asda) Fujitsu Laptop with a damp cloth, I wiped it with a wet cloth.
Yes.......A few hours later I then wondered why two thirds of the screen was now covered with a huge freaking dark stain (water mark).
Of course it was ruined. Or was it?
I found a bloke on youtube who showed himself rubbing gently at the screen with a soft cloth to "repair" water damage. I tried this on a small patch. Nothing.

So.......(Obviously) I then bought a new Laptop from John Lewis. (£500).

A few days later I switched on the old one to retrieve some files. Huh? Is the stain shrinking?
Yes it was.
In fact.......2 weeks later it had completely gone. The only area that was damaged was the tiny area where I had rubbed at the screen.
I hope this helps somebody one day.

Sambostar

Pretty easy to replace the backlight too.  I did that on an old Vaio, got some more RAM and replaced the keyboard and touchpad too.  Bascially the whole of the bottom half of the casing.  Worth it as spares are cheap as chips.

Someone once said NEVER take a laptop apart as you'll bever get them back together.  Rubbish, loads of room and easy to replace bits, so long as you anti static.

holnrew

I usually stick them on eBay.

chrispy108

I had the bottom half of a laptop setup in the kitchen as a TV/Plex Server for a few years, then when I moved it lived under the sofa as a Plex Server.

Built a new gaming PC which has taken over that duty, so not sure what to do with it now. Might hook it up to the TV in the man room.