Laptop Photo Frame
So you have this really old laptop that has less power than a new Eee PC. What to do, what to do? I guess do what everyone else is doing these days and turn it into a photo frame!
The victim was an old Acer TravelMate 240. It ended up being quite an easy mod. The hinges were symmetrical and the inverter and video cables for the screen were more than long enough for some re-routing. The hard drive is full of errors so I am booting it off a USB key. The problem with that was the BIOS does not support booting from USB. I dropped on a custom boot loader on the hard drive that then boots off the USB drive.
Currently I am running Puppy Linux off a 1GB drive. It runs very well. Now all I need is to install an image viewer and have it mount a photos share off the house server and it will be complete. Check it out in the photos below.
-
- The cover off and look at all that cable!
-
- The screen flipped around and fitting perfectly.
-
- The screen flipped no problems.
-
- Trimming the cable cover next to the hinge.
-
- The power and video cables to the screen
-
- The refitted hinge covers
-
- Scanning the hard drive
-
- The (almost) finished product
