Busted your laptop screen or just have no use for that old notebook any more? Snapguides user Vaibhav has a neat DIY project to turn it into a slide-out PC for your TV, powered by XBMC .
Apart from the laptop, you’ll need a sliding channel, a spike buster, a wireless keyboard, and a display cord. Before you start, make sure there’s enough room behind the TV to slide your laptop in — with most mounted TVs, this shouldn’t be a problem.
The sliding track will be fitted on the wall behind the TV and one channel screwed on the laptop. Make all the necessary connections and you should be good to go. Check out the full guide for step-by-step pics.
One thing to note: detaching the screen from your laptop isn’t that easy. Also, some laptops house the wireless adaptor in the monitor’s part, so you will need to reattach that — although I’d suggest just buying a USB Wi-Fi adaptor. There’s a decent generic guide on eHow for removing laptop screens, but it’s best to search forums for your own model first.
How To Use Your Old Laptop [SnapGuides]
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3 responses to “Turn Your Old Laptop Into A Hideaway Media Centre”
Laptops may have the WiFi card in the base of the laptop however often the WiFi and Bluetooth antennas are around the laptop screen so removing the back cover is also removing the wireless antennas, even though the wireless cards are still in the laptop. This will mean reduced signal strenth.
….as mentioned in the article
Since it’s low power and you want it available on-demand, you’ll probably leave it running all the time…which makes it a perfect little home server. You can use it as a torrent box, VPN server, owncloud, etc without affecting video playback at all.
In uni I used to love ‘broken’ headless laptops. you could go to any house, duct tape the thing under a desk or wedge it in a cupboard, and you’d have an instant LAN.