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."

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

Re:if it wasnt for busted laptops i woulnt have on

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.laptopparts.com/laptop-keyboard/sony-ke yboard.asp?series=VAIO [laptopparts.com]

Re:How interesting.

[rincebrain]

Abiword.

KOffice seems a bit bloated to me. I don't, personally, like any word processor that I have to count to ten before it opens a native document.

Re:if it wasnt for busted laptops i woulnt have on

[Celvin]

You can get a roll-up keyboard from here [thinkgeek.com]

Re:Is there a point?

[bhtooefr]

Installing the thin client system depends on the server's OS. If it's Windows NT Terminal Server, 2000 Server/Advanced Server/Datacenter, XP Pro, or Server 2003, just install Remote Desktop Connection (or, if the client is running Windows 3.1, Terminal Services Client, and if it's running Linux, rdesktop). If the server is anything else, try Ultr@VNC on Windows (ultravnc.sf.net - a TightVNC mod to add chat and filesharing capabilities - very nice, but there is no server for Linux - at least the client runs on Wine), and TightVNC on Linux. The client is ridiculously easy whether it's VNC or Remote Desktop. The server could be a little challenging if it's on Linux (I haven't gotten mine to work how I want yet - it starts KDE, and I DON'T want that - I can't experiment now, anyway, due to a botched overclocking attempt (233.333 to 262.500MHz).

Re:Thin Clients

[TheRaven64]

You might get better performance out of Windows 3.11 (although setting up TCP/IP is a bit less fun). If all you're doing is running a remote desktop client (MS remote desktop client is available for Win32, Win16, Mac and there's even an open implementation for *NIX) then you probably don't need things like protected memory or pre-emptive multitasking (after all, you're only running one program) so you don't need the overhead of these.

Re:Thin Clients

[isorox]

Trouble is, old laptops tend to have crap, if any, battery life. Wireless is great, but it still leaves you tied down.

I use an old laptop as a personal dns/mail/web server. It's not fast, but it doesn't need to be. More importantly if I trip the fusebox, my server stays up for 5 and a half minutes. Poor man's UPS.

Re:Donate to schools...

[GigsVT]

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.

The card you seek ..

[Anonymous Coward]

The Netgear MA401 is 16bit compatable. See pdf page 11 in MA401 maunal [netgear.com] (2M file).

Overstock.com has a few for $30 [overstock.com] ($33 with shipping).

Home Control

[Mr_Disorganized]

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.

Re:Useful

[loubrush]

Np, I find it better to have a more expendible machine to use for this. Btw, I'm actually a girl

Re:I have been wanting to do this! Any suggestions

[loubrush]

You need to connect a c64 drive to your machine, see http://sta.c64.org/xe1541.html [c64.org]

Re:Safety First

[Thomas Shaddack]

The tube has mecurey and uses high voltage. It's not the same as tearing apart an old C64.

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.

Re:Not terrifically exciting, but an easy read

[Anonymous Coward]

cisco CF cards have the switch.

I snagged a few 64 meg cisco CF cards and used them for the same kind of tasks.

Granted you need to work in a datacenter where they are throwing out those cards because they just upgraded.

Re:Not terrifically exciting, but an easy read

[H_Fisher]

Isn't most of this stuff a bit.. well.. obvious?

Well, yeah, but those aren't things I'd have thought of doing right off the bat, even when I had a broken laptop to deal with myself (the motherboard in my old Thinkpad shorted, transforming itself from state of the art to pure 'n' utter junk in moments). After some research and very careful surgery I separated the LCD and sold it. Brilliant.

IMO things like this that keep stuff out of junkyards is worthwhile :)

Re:Safety First

[Thomas Shaddack]

its mercury salts that are poisonous... (hence the "mad hatters"), not mercury, *sigh*

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 [american.edu]).