Month: April 2024

I had an old Core 2 based “Pentium” laptop kicking around, battery long past dead, no charger either.  Only had 2 GB of RAM, wifi card was already missing… No HDD either! I really had no use for the laptop.

So, what to get rid of? Well, as you’ll see further along, I wanted to make this a more compact and simple solution. For most people it probably would make the most sense to just leave your old laptop as, well… a laptop. This thing is nothing special though. Don’t get me wrong, it is 15 years old sure, but that isn’t why it’s considered by most to be nothing more than e-waste. This 15 year old laptop specifically, was pretty poor spec’d even when it was new. New this PC was between $300 – $400, in 2009. So, that is why the battery is no longer in the mix — I have enough paperweights. This battery hasn’t held any charge in a long time. The hinges, webcam, usb ports? Save those for another project. If that’s your thing.

In my opinion this actually looks somewhat respectable. This doesn’t always happen whitest trying to run a laptop motherboard outside of the machine it came in. Not seen in the pictures of the hardware no longer being used is the plastic casing (obviously) and also both SATA drives it previously had. A DVD-RW drive which I don’t need, and a 5,400 RPM 2.5″ hard disk which I… well, I haven’t actually got a spare at the moment! A plus of this laptop MB layout is that the HDD mounts on top of, and not overhanging any edge of it. But for now we don’t have any SATA drives. Something else is in store.

 

The furniture pads keep the board up and off my my desk so it sits with (albeit a small amount) dignity. Here we can see a dirty secret… White tape covering the blindingly bright white and orange LEDs. That little LED board also holds the power button. Kinda important. Some hot glue was used here, hot glue can make a project go south quickly but in some cases it can be forgiven. In the lower left corner you may have spotted the solution to my lacking of a hard drive.

Like I said, a big Raspberry Pi.  It even boots from an SD card!

    Putting an operating system on something like an SD card isn’t something I’d recommend.  However, as seen here it is quite convenient to test multiple configurations.