Last week I addressed one solution to find usefulness in something broken–salvaging the still functional parts to use in something else. But depending on what goes wrong, it is possible to change the way you use a broken device to take advantage of what does work while avoiding the problems of what doesn’t work.
Through hand-me-downs, tinkering projects (broken laptops) given to me, and my own laptops, I have dealt with a wide variety of laptop problems. In some cases I could repair the laptop myself to either use or give to someone who needed it, but in others the laptop was essentially totaled and completely useless. This post discusses one broken laptop that I was able to give new life, even though it was essentially unrepairable and ended up being no longer exactly a laptop.
One of my biggest splurges and greatest joys in high school was a gaming laptop. Unfortunately, its display stopped working shortly after its warranty expired, likely caused by an expensive-to-repair problem with either the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) or the screen itself. The GPU and its associated parts are a relatively common point of failure in laptops. Opening and closing the hinge puts wear on the cables that lie within the hinges, and laptops often run hot, which is not an ideal environment for any computer component to have a long lifespan. As part of my initial troubleshooting, I powered up the laptop while connected to an external display. Everything showed up as normal on that monitor–the GPU worked and it could even play games just as well as it used to.
The only part that didn’t work was the laptop screen itself, and replacing the screen would cost way more than I wanted to pay to bring the laptop back to life. With this in my mind I decided to attempt a relatively inexpensive repair, replacing a cable connecting the motherboard on the keyboard half of the laptop to the screen. Unfortunately, this did not solve the problem. But while my laptop was essentially useless as a laptop, it was not useless as a computer. Unfortunately, I didn’t need a computer, I needed a laptop, so I got a new laptop, and the broken laptop sat for a couple years essentially untouched, until the COVID-19 lockdown started. With two students taking online classes and parents zooming into work or other things, often simultaneously, we needed more computer workspaces in sonically separate parts of the house. That’s where repurposing comes in.
Attached to power and an external monitor, the laptop was ready to be a computer–keyboard and trackpad included, but I made a few changes to the setup anyway. The first and largest change was removing the screen of the laptop altogether. This made it easier to position and use the laptop without accidentally shutting it off by closing the lid. This also had some of its own drawbacks, primarily that the antennae for the wifi ran along the border of the screen and there was no more webcam. Wired internet, which I intended to use anyway and a USB webcam fixed both of those things. The other change was to use an external mouse and keyboard.
The former laptop has been repurposed into essentially a small desktop. It couldn’t function as a laptop after the screen broke, but it gained new life as a computer with the things that did work.