This project was started before I redesigned the site but I’ve put this information up here for information.

I’ve only journalled half the project so far. Although the project is more or less complete I still need to document all the steps.

Project Aims

I found myself in possession of a dead laptop. The HDD was shot, the DVD drive didn’t work and the battery wouldn’t take any kind of charge. Needless to say, with no DVD or HDD it wasn’t bootable in any way, shape or form even though the laptop would turn on when connected to the mains.

I had the idea of stripping down the laptop and salvaging what I could to create one of those nifty digital photo displays that I’ve seen in the shops. I figured that the motherboard and the LCD panel still worked so maybe I could strip those out and place them in a nice wooden photo frame (as opposed to the nasty plastic things that commercial digial photo frames are surrounded with).

So, here’s the aims I had in mind:

• A 14″ digital photo frame that would be connected to the mains
• As the laptop had no working drive and a photo frame needed to be silent, I would replace the duff drive with a compact flash card.
• As I’d be using a SSD device (CF card) to boot the frame, the OS needed to have as small a footprint as possible to leave as much room on the card for photos
• The boot time should be as rapid as possible (which pretty much rules out windows…)
• Whatever software I used would need to be able to show a slideshow of digital images

The project steps

Opening the case

There were some problems along the way. At some point in the past, some idiot had super-glued the main case screws in place. I’m pretty sure that isn’t a standard practice of any laptop manufacturer.

I got around that by cutting around the screw posts, carefully avoiding any underlying components. After that (which took a while because I didn’t want to damage anything other than the case) I just had to pop open the case clips around the edges.

Removing the keyboard



Once the screws were cut away and the case unclipped it was easy to remove the keyboard by releasing the catches on either side at the front of the keyboard and lifting the keyboard forwards. The image to the right shows the catch on the right-hand-side after the keyboard had been lifted out (which is why the keyboard is below the catch).

Preparing to Remove the LCD panel

There were four screws that attached the LCD panel to the laptop base. To access these I had to remove the plastic coverings that concealed them. Although it was tempting to unscrew them straight away I first had to take care of the electrical connections between the motherboard and display.

There are two main connections that attach an LCD panel to the computer. These are usually concealed below the plastic strip above the keyboard. before I could remove the LCD panel I needed to deal with the keyboard and its plastic surround so I could unplug the screen.

Removing the keyboard and facia

After releasing the keyboard’s ribbon cable from its interface it was easy to remove the keyboard from the motherboard and remove the upper facia by unclipping it from the lower section.

You can see the RAM sockets in the middle of the board (with one stick installed). This wasn’t one of those helpful laptops with RAM accessible through a panel on the base. :)

Disconnecting and removing the LCD panel

Once the keyboard surround had been removed I was able to access the LCD panel wiring and uncouple the two connections to the motherboard.

The image to the right shows the uncoupled connections. You can also see the system’s main power switch just to the right of the connections. That little switch would cause me problems later on… :-?

Once the wiring had been taken care of I was able to unscrew the panel and put it aside for later. Until then I needed to finish extracting the laptop’s motherboard from the base.

Goodbye useless crap

To remove the motherboard from the upper chassis plate I first had to remove the modem. This wasn’t a problem as I doubted that I’d have a need for a modem in a media frame. ;)

Underneath the modem daughterboard were a number of bolts that I had to remove to seperate the motherboard and chassis plate.

As the touchpad was embedded in the chassis plate, there wasn’t really a practical way to salvage it. I didn’t see the point in preserving the touchpad. I don’t like using them anyway and I’d still have a USB and PS2 port to attach a mouse if I needed one.