I have an old Rock laptop (3.4ghz, 1gb ram, 60gb HD) which has died on me. I think the display is busted. However, I don't really want to bin it and was wondering if anyone has any interesting ideas for canabalising it and making something useful from it.

Idea's requiring the purchase of parts etc also welcome.

Phil

That's old?

(Sorry, this is not a helpful, or indeed serious, answer.)

if it's only the display that isn't working, how about hooking it up to the TV using a pc to tv converter and having access to your computer on your main tv for internet radio / video / youtube, etc. That's what I use an old laptop computer for.

If its a Pentium 4 (Not a P4M) then junk it. When the P4M (Mobile) cost far more than a desktop P4 CPU many of the laptop manufacturers decided to use the desktop CPU in laptops. The piece of crap was such a power hog and heat pig that a battery charge usually never lasted mroe than an hour and the power supply was a brick. Eventually they would cook themselves because there was no adequate way to dissapate all the heat from that CPU.

So, like I said- If its P4- Junk it.

You an make it into a headless server, or use it with an external monitor.

Just throwing it away seems like an awful waste. Isn't there any charity place that would take it?

Many companies will take stuff like this off your hands and find use for it or safe disposal. I think even Dell offers this now.

You could mail it to me. and feel like you've done some good in this world hahaha.

*edit

Besides the broken display. Your "old" laptop puts my current one, and even my desktop to shame.

Boy, I really need to catch up on technology.

1. FreeNAS Live CD and turn it into a NAS box with uPNP support for streaming Audio/Video to your N8x0.

2. If it has TV out or your TV has VGA inputs, install Myth and turn it into a Media Player.

3. ??????????????

4. Profit

Car computer. Run mpd and huge stash of music on it, playing through stereo, also streaming to tablet, and functioning as NAS for tablet (start a batch of transcoded movies transfering from car-computer to tablet when you start your drive, they're on by the end).
Don't know how good Linux BT support is in general (I know HFP isn't really working on tablets, but maybe better on desktop Linux), but if you could make it talk HFP to your cell-phone, and stream to/from your tablet by wi-fi... All sorts of options.
I've an old laptop, with good display, that I'm going to do such stuff with when I've time.

I had a laptop with a busted screen and used it for three years running Ipcop firewall. You could run other types of servers on it. Having a battery in the laptop means you have backup power too.

Rich