I’m excited. Why? Because I have in my possession a knackered laptop.

You’d think this wouldn’t be a cause for joy but I’ve got over the dissapointment (it’s only a PIII 500MHz with 64Mb of RAM) and now I’m thinking outside the box.

What could I do with a knackered laptop? I mean – normally I wouldn’t dream of doing anything interesting with a working laptop other than try to find it a new home with a loving owner. But a broken laptop screams possibilities!

So, I’ve been thinking that I quite like those digital picture frames that seem all the rage right now. You know – the ones that have really tiny screens and a crap resolution of 400 pixels across or whatever. Being the geek I am, I’ve even thought I’d quite like one until I’ve thought about how crap the screen is.

So… imagine a digital photo frame with a 14″ screen and a resolution of 1024×768. :)  I know I am.  I think it would look pretty good, sitting on the shelf showing pictures of my beloved and other nice things to look at.

I’m thinking that if I rip out all the bits that don’t work (DVD drive and hard drive are both knackered and would cost far too much to replace anyway) and mount it in the back of a deep picture frame it might just work out.

The big catch is that the laptop won’t boot from USB. I’ve tried. It doesn’t even have an option in its CMOS. I may have to end up getting a cheap HDD for it. And I’ll have to figure out how to get around the non-functional CD-ROM. I wonder if the optical ribbon has come loose?

In the end, it’s broken anyway so I don’t have much to lose although that doesn’t mean I won’t be careful. :)