I have an old school laptop that I want to throw away. Can I use the LCD for anything useful? MS display? Or just junk the bastard?

 

You can make it into a projector:

http://www.engadget.com/2006/10/17/h...jector-part-1/

 

Movie projector. Find one of those old school style projectors (like you used to see in grade school), and set it on top, or make something out of lenses. There's a whole community of people cobbling things together to make home projectors.


Wow. gotta learn to type faster!

 

This thread is relevant to my interests. I have a dead netbook with a good screen.

 

bookmarked, thanks

 

Typically, the display on a laptop will not accommodate any "external" video interface such as VGA or HDMI. Most commonly, they interface to the main board via some form of LVDS bus, such as FPDLink or LDI.

This is why the writeup that Jeff linked to retained the full electronics package from a working donor monitor.

 

Change get new hard drive, get new OS get new RAM.

But, I've thought about this before, and haven't found a use for a broken laptop unless the hard drive is still working, in which case you can make an external hard drive.

Or you can shoot it.

 

I was going to suggest projector a well. I actually built one when I was a poor college student and wanted a big screen. I used a 15" lcd screen, 30000 lumen metal halide bulb, two fresnel lenses and a projection triplet. I still have it and it works surprisingly well. Not sure if it makes economic sense anymore though. I got my info from lumenlab.com.

 

Hack up dash, insert, make it a carputer. Depends on what size screen tho. Frisbee. But a projector out of your trunk ala Pimp you ride style for the random shooter game time killer .

Edit: Mount it to the back of the roll bar to tell the people behind you what you think. Or use it side window style with a powerpoint film asking girls ( or guys) to "show their *****". Powerpoint worked for me once.