Soldato
- Joined
- 31 Mar 2006
- Posts
- 6,606
- Location
- Sydney Australia
I've been posting this in the Laptop thread but no-one seems interested in it there so I thought I'd move it into here.
It's been done a few times before but I thought I'd have a go at it myself.
A friend of mine has recently gone home to New Zealand and has kindly left me his old laptop. It was at one point or another dropped and the screen fairly well destroyed. I initially had plans to turn it into a media PC but with the addition of a rather long HDMI lead between my PC and the TV I no longer need this.
Enter plan B - a total conversion mod from laptop to touch pad/tablet PC.
I was rather taken by the idea of the Apple iPad but decided that paying £400 minimum for a half baked excuse for a PC or worse yet an oversized and not overly mobile iPhone/iPod touch I thought I'd set out with a budget of around £200-£300 and see if I could make myself one.
Technically this is not a difficult thing to do as long as you have a rudimentary understanding of electronics and some minor soldering skills.
So what I currently have is a dismantled laptop with a smashed screen. The laptop is an Asus A6000.
It has an AMD processor in it (I'm not entirely sure which - I'll have to have a look at it once I get it out from under its heat sink.) and a couple of gig of ram. It also comes with a DVD-RW drive and a whole stack of USB ports (4 all up) so connectivity and using a keyboard and a mouse with it are not going to be a problem nor is installing my intended OS, Windows 7 Home Prem.
The plan.
Essentially I intend on cutting out the area surrounding the keyboard and touch pad and insert a new replacement LCD screen in the hole that is left whilst retaining all the inbuilt buttons so that the fabrication side of things will be kept to a minimum.
So on the shopping list:
1x Dremel style multi-tool Link - £32
1x replacement LCD Link - £70
1x Resistive widescreen touch panel kit link - £90
1x soldering iron plus bits - £15
1x Windows 7 Home Prem upgrade - £65
Total at this stage including a laptop: £272
It's been done a few times before but I thought I'd have a go at it myself.
A friend of mine has recently gone home to New Zealand and has kindly left me his old laptop. It was at one point or another dropped and the screen fairly well destroyed. I initially had plans to turn it into a media PC but with the addition of a rather long HDMI lead between my PC and the TV I no longer need this.
Enter plan B - a total conversion mod from laptop to touch pad/tablet PC.
I was rather taken by the idea of the Apple iPad but decided that paying £400 minimum for a half baked excuse for a PC or worse yet an oversized and not overly mobile iPhone/iPod touch I thought I'd set out with a budget of around £200-£300 and see if I could make myself one.
Technically this is not a difficult thing to do as long as you have a rudimentary understanding of electronics and some minor soldering skills.
So what I currently have is a dismantled laptop with a smashed screen. The laptop is an Asus A6000.
It has an AMD processor in it (I'm not entirely sure which - I'll have to have a look at it once I get it out from under its heat sink.) and a couple of gig of ram. It also comes with a DVD-RW drive and a whole stack of USB ports (4 all up) so connectivity and using a keyboard and a mouse with it are not going to be a problem nor is installing my intended OS, Windows 7 Home Prem.
The plan.
Essentially I intend on cutting out the area surrounding the keyboard and touch pad and insert a new replacement LCD screen in the hole that is left whilst retaining all the inbuilt buttons so that the fabrication side of things will be kept to a minimum.
So on the shopping list:
1x Dremel style multi-tool Link - £32
1x replacement LCD Link - £70
1x Resistive widescreen touch panel kit link - £90
1x soldering iron plus bits - £15
1x Windows 7 Home Prem upgrade - £65
Total at this stage including a laptop: £272
I will install W7 on it at my first convenience but because it has USB ports on it I can just connect any mouse and keyboard as I like.
For some reason it reminds me of a Nintendo DS 
