Recycling Your Broken Laptop

I’ve always wanted a digital frame. When I was little, I remember my dad sticking our pictures from our manual camera into albums. Many did not even make it to albums, they’d just stay in photo bags along with their negatives. They are probably stacked in his closet somewhere. Now, even with a digital camera, many of my pictures just sit in my hard drive. They stay put along with my other files. So, clearly I love the idea of a digital frame. It’s such an easy and perfect way to display your photographs and re-live your memories. But my geek husband is dead against buying it. According to him, a digital frame is no more than a flat screen with a memory stick, and he was not going to let me pay $100 for a 10 inch frame. His logic was to buy a 19 inch flat monitor, hang it on the wall and connect it to an old CPU. You’d drill the cable through your wall so the monitor just hangs on your wall. You would spend more than $100 to get this up and running but you’d get more than a picture frame.  You’d still be able to use it as a computer when needed. For the longest time, we had a flat monitor stuck on our wall. I liked what he did, but you know it looks like a screen saver on a computer rather than a frame. Finally after a year of trying to convince him we needed a more frame like photo display, geek dude recently found the perfect alibi to create a digital frame for me.

Last week, my laptop broke. It literally broke. It’s a 360 turn gateway tablet and while it did the cool turn, its joint started to loosen and it finally gave way last week. The sides are now cracked and the monitor can no longer stand on its own. I am more concerned that the wires connecting the machine and the screen will break and it will be good as dead. I’d most likely have to get a replacement to get it fixed and with the fee that I’d have to pay for it to be replaced I’d rather buy myself a brand new laptop. So, while I was in the verge of dumping it to a corner for the time being, geek dude knew exactly how he wanted to put my frail laptop to use. And like many of his projects, this one was also a midnight mini project. Now I have a chic digital frame in my living room that looks like exactly like a picture frame and nothing close to a broken laptop. But it’s a touch screen and it’s wireless!!!

He taped the broken part and made sure the screen and the keyboard part are intact	That's an old frame that he took apart
The frame size is perfect for the laptop	Booting your laptop.
It's still a touch screen!	Installed a slideshow program that pulls out pictures from your folders

Catch: You need the power cord attached to the laptop, so I hide it behind the table. You could charge your batteries and leave it without the power cord and recharge when needed. And I’ll have to go back and upload new pictures to the specific folder. But you know what, all the computers in my home are networked (thanks to geek dude!), so I don’t have to use the same laptop to download pictures from my camera. I’ll just paste them through another computer. YAY!

We still have to find a way to bind the laptop and the frame. Probably with some wire but for now, it’s standing on my side table resting on the wall and looks perfect!