Convert a broken Laptop into a Desktop
Vložit
- čas přidán 14. 07. 2018
- Broken laptop screen? In this video I will remove the screen and we use it as a keyboard with integrated computer!
Disclosure: Some links in this description are affiliate links. I receive a small commission when you make a purchase. There are no additional costs to you.
Support PhilsComputerLab:
Amazon.com: amzn.to/3fvz8sg
AliExpress: s.click.aliexpress.com/e/b6c7Xgiy
eBay US: ebay.us/bKzLAW
ebay UK: ebay.us/Bs9Z0u
eBay Germany: ebay.us/k3bPol
eBay Canada: ebay.us/CD6KZz
eBay Australia: ebay.us/eon4Ys
GOG: adtr.co/eqi5mb
PayPal donation: www.paypal.me/PhilsComputerLab - Věda a technologie
I did this years ago with an old IBM ThinkPad. I called it a "halftop"!
VWestlife I remember watching that video... did it have a CRT?
Cool bro
Raindrop drop top halftop with no drop top
I have 2 acers with broken screens that I did this to. But I might mod one of them even more
Yeah "halftop" is more accurate. I came here expecting Phil to stick the motherboard in a min-ATX tower.
The fact a keyboard is able to get a better download speed than me is.... Intresting.
Very nice video man, I could see it being useful as a portable desktop/media system for hooking up to a Monitor
horry shet ur here
#BT #OpenReach #UK #CopperWiresFromTHe80s
Same. Sometimes we are getting 45kb per second. We are happy with 500kb per second.
It looks like a new Version of a Commodore.
i like the aesthetic alot as well... i would like a PC like this!
Commodore 69 ( ͡o ͜ʖ ͡o)
@@five5105 commodore 420 blaze it ;)
Im looking for a commodore 64 emulator for it.
chuwidore
Nice to see Chewbacca got his own laptop brand XD
Philips?
@@jaykacin1334 Chewi not Phillips
This sort of headless laptop was my main machine for a couple of years because I was a poor school student.
Could be used as a server I guess, if it's a stable machine. I mean it's got built in battery back-up and all
Oh man I love doing this! In the early 2000s I had a desktop that died and no way to repair it at the time so I grabbed my busted up laptop with bad screen and removed it and used it as a desktop for around 6 months. It was awesome to see friends faces when they would pull out the keyboard tray to use my PC and see half a laptop and get confused. Thanks for sharing the pro tip Phil!
Definitely a better solution than throwing away this otherwise still functional device.
My old Atom netbook recently died, the screen has lines on it. I was really sad and was about to throw it out this week but you've made me reconsider. Legend idea!
Do keep us posted as how you went!
@@philscomputerlab i wanna try this oneday
My go to option for laptops with broken display is to use them like server, mostly because of low noise and power usage. Integrated psu helps a bit as well.
Yea it's fanless, makes no noise whatsoever. My main "server" is TV box from Beelink, same CPU, but more RAM I believe. I think it draws under 10W and runs 24/7.
What do you do with that server?
The Commodore 64 in 2018.
I had this mad thought of Phil tearing down the highway being chased by police, Phil looks at the speedometer... "Oh I'm getting 90 FPS now!" :D
In all seriousness, yes I myself don't like to throw away hardware when I see potential. The screen on my mum's ancient Toshiba laptop went out several years ago... the laptop has served as the family HTPC ever since then, running Kodi and connected to the TV.
You could open the lcd, remove the second wireless antenna, and put it inside the laptop. I've done that to a broken laptop, when i replaced the lcd.
A awesome option, now that it is a fixed laptop, is a external gpu that would probably boost somehow its performance.
I dont know if it has thunderbolt or any pciex for wireless cards, but if it has, it may help a bit.
Great idea, didn't think of that... Now with the eGPU, the wireless module is soldered, so it doesn't have a PCIe slot. There is mSATA, but I think that one is only for storage. I'm happy as it it is, but I do want to mod some better cooling, these Apollo Lake chipsets throttle easily.
If you think about it, every laptop has a bit of the Commodore spirit inside.
It looks like the modern iteration of the 64C.
Someone gave me a laptop with a broken screen and I did the same as you.
Great idea if you have a broken laptop screen!
My current pc is half a laptop. Works fine!
This is a much easier solution than that other guy who turned his broken laptop into an HTPC as well, though it was all tailored and custom cut out of wood and aluminium and whatever.. definitely a more elegant solution but not everyone has access to such tools and resources. plus this has a very budget friendly, easy and practical DIY element to it which i love.
and yes it does look like a C64 :P
Dankification For The Masses yeah that guy's name is Matt from DIY Perks BTW and I loved his videos up until the time when he started to get sponsored by squarespace. What does a website making tool have to do with making things out of wood and aluminum??? That is also one of the reasons why I stopped watching Linus tech tips, because of their unrelated sponsorship ads. I can understand that people make sponsored videos and would definetly like to get sponsored myself but then only if the sponsor has something to do with the actual subject of the video or the whole channel. Like Phil, who gets stuff from Electromyne which to me is totally okay because it has a direct connection to the channel and Phil's ideas
Some laptops don't show anything on second monitors until Windows has finished loading, though, which is unfortunate.
Yea a few have mentioned this, seems to differ between machines.
Another possibility is than it will not detect an internal LVDS screen attached, so may try with external monitor if available... Maybe.
Great vid Phil!
That problem can be solved, you can make it show bios on external monitor, just search it on google.
Stefan Batrinache there is no such option
Sadly that depends on the laptop. For example on my Acer laptop, there's no such option, but there's no need for it since the bios will automatically show on an external monitor if it detects it (whetever is via VGA or HDMI)
I only got into PC gaming 2 years ago (I’m 14) and I asked my mom if I could have the broken Dell Dimension E310 in the Basement. She said whatever and didn’t care if I smashed it with a hammer (she told me I could, she didn’t give af about it). But I didn’t. I took apart a old laptop that was running Windows XP, stole the hard drive, and I managed to get the old E310 to boot. Asked my mom if I could buy HL2. She asked me why, and I said I got the computer to work. Ended up playing HL2 until I got a Modern Laptop
That’s almost what I did with my laptop too! I connected it to external display and keyboard and put laptop into drawer. Now I use it as if it was computer :)
Benefits: its supper silent.
Cons: it’s not that powerful as a computer BUT I can say for sure it does a job for me.
Me: watches the video and looks at the laptop
Laptop: oh shit!!
"Tried to fix it, made it a lot worse. " this is my life in one sentence.
Something like this is what I want do with an early 2000s laptop(p3ish). Basically use it a convenient DOS and Windows 98 machine, that takes very little storage space and is easy to setup. You also get around this era of laptop's biggest flaw this way: the awful, ghosting screens.
I think Dosbox would be a lot simpler so you can chose hardware you want to emulate for each game.
That’s a great idea. I’ve got a basic Windows 7 era laptop with a broken screen. We’ve used it as an emulation box, just keeping it closed and using external everything.
But even with all the power management features turned off, it would still go to power save mode too soon because of the laptop lid being closed. So this might be a cool option.
Yeah, I have done some of this on my office broken and old laptop. I strip the LCD monitor and Keyboard, then replace it with usb M+K. Its better than scrapped the asset because its much more complicated than repurposed it.
That were to happen to the flex cable in my PS2 slim when I were to replace the laser. One day it'll be repaired..one day...
ComputerCatGaming play the games via usb flash drive or hdd.
defo8811 actually after that I actually got an old fat PS2 which I softmodded with FreeMCboot, so now I run all my PS2 games of an 230GB IDE drive. :)
Nice. Its way more convenient that way if you ask me. Older consoles had the habit to fail their optical/laser drives.
Yeah, also the loading times are reduced so games such as Crash wrath of cortex is actually playable.
Yeah that happened to me in my fat ps2 as well, i've got the cable, but it's the whole process of taking everything apart that stops me from actually finishing it hahah
Hook up a wireless hdmi and you have a perfect couch sitting machine!
I like that idea! I wonder what the performance is like, if it's good enough for gaming?
please do a video on that idea.
Only one way to find out!
yup
@@philscomputerlab why would you game on that? It cannot even run Doom3, let alone Crysis!!
I've heard the term "half-top" used to describe machines just like this. Screen-less laptops can be quite handy in certain situations.
What an awesome concept. I would never have thought of this as a project. Fantastic video.
Thank you so much for this. I have a very powerful broken laptop. Screen cracked, hinge broke. Only causes troubles. I use it with external monitor, but I too wondered if detaching the panel completely would be possible. Your content will serve as a valuable resource. Ty
You might be able to find an LCD driver board to make use of the screen from the laptop :).
I had the reverse... computer died but the screen was fine... found some circuit boards that made the laptop screen into a DVI monitor!
I remeber when I was a kid, I had found a broken acer laptop that didn't have a working screen. We had extra monitors so I used an acer monitor that was barley fit in a backpack no one was using.That basically became my portable setup and it had some decent specs. The 1st video on my channel was made on my laptop at that time. I still have a lot of good memories on it.
Wow! What a cool idea!
I got a fairly older HP Pavilion lappy from a friend before he moved. The screen was totally shattered, so I dismantled it, grabbed the antenna, stuck it to the base, and made it an ultra SFF HTPC. Still pretty good for an A6.
Not just one time. But the first time it was my AMD Duron 900Mhz back in 2002, or so. After chaning the themral paste and removing the copperspacer (it was useless), I put on the cooler the wrong way, which practically killed it.
This is very cool and creative! I have an IBM thinkpad which I had no idea what to do with and almost threw it away before watching this video. You inspired me, I might try something like this with it. Thanks!
It feels nice to read all these stories of people repurposing their broken laptops :)
you could crack open the screen and check if the lcd connector is standard and get a lvds screen to hdmi converter. the project still look really good
For those who want to try this at home, I’ve written out the steps below.
1. Remove laptop screen
While I never took the time to actually remove the busted laptop screen, I've run a lot of laptops with non function displays off of an external monitor over the years. Might have to remove the broken display on one sometime, but only if I run across one with an interesting enough case like this one.
I've done this to Dell Inspiron 5558 as my screen had literally packed in so I just took that crap out and hooked it up to my Samsung 4k monitor and is running great! Your idea is in fact amazing so thanks for that..
Never thought of doing this before, nice idear, pick up a sutible "broken" laptop, and it may be a great machine for older games, emulators etc!
That's it! If you look around a bit, you can likely find a very high end machine and use it that way. I should really do that :)
there are usually lcd drivers (pcbs) on aliexpress. just completely disassemble your screen and take a look at the panel model number.. search it on aliexpress or dhgate or dx or whatever. find a circuitry board for it and make it a monitor. steampunk style.
Those friction hinges can be a real pain in the backside. I've got an Asus Zenbook UX303LN from a few years ago (i5-4210U, GF 840M DDR3) and after about 6 months of use the hinge broke away from the chassis. It uses a similar hinge style to the Chuwi Lapbook, but attaches into a plastic piece that is glued to the chassis. The plastic is extremely brittle and shatters very easily leaving the hinge with nowhere to attach to and nothing to push against.
I ended up self repairing it due to not really being able to send it away for warranty, I needed it for university and I was travelling a long way from home. After several attempts at fixing the problem, my final solution has so far been to remove 90% of the factory plastic and replace it with a different plastic block piece that has been glued into place with epoxy, then screwing the hinge into the new plastic and then filling the remaining space with silicone which effectively seals the whole assembly in place.
Three and a half years later the laptop still works fine and I'd say the hinge works better now than it did when I walked out of the store. It's much more stable and doesn't rock around or feel loose. For a while there I half considered doing exactly what you've done in this video as the UX303LN has both a HDMI and miniDP output, but I needed the portability so I had no choice but to find some sort of alternative repair for the hinge.
Back in 2003 when I was 8 (dammit I feel old now), my uncle gave me a laptop that he had accidentally cracked the screen on, so I did exactly what you've done here, I had it hooked up to an old CRT monitor, and had to track down a serial ball mouse as it only had 1 PS/2 connector which I used for a second keyboard, so I could play emulators and split screen games with my friends. Honestly the thing was a piece of junk, but it was my junk, and it got me through a pretty dull part of my childhood.
I remember programming games on it, but the IDE I used couldn't compile on it for some reason, so I would have to wait till the family computer was free to compile them and see if they were working.
Thanks for the idea phil i just recently got a laptop with a broken screen and i know the laptop still works so im gonna take the screen of like you did thx
Chuwi? I wonder who’s the CEO.
Perhaps it’s Chewbacca?
Erased Blank. Nice
@@ayanamisuki peter
You can remove the antenna from the screen and put it somewhere on the base
You can also buy a controller board for the LCD and make a monitor for cheap, since what broke on the screen was the flat cable...
I doubt it would be worth it considering that, the machine being a china crap netbook, the panel is most likely as bad quality as you can get, and basic, under 1080p used monitors are cheap as dirt. If anyone wants to do it for fun, leaving cost-effectiveness aside, well, that's another story.
I had the LCD gutted off from NEC Versa E2000. Broken PC, but screen works. I thought the same too.
Too bad I don't bought a controller. So it just collecting dust
BilisNegra Have you seen the review of the laptop? It has a IPS screen, of course it worth to buy a 30$ board to drive the screen...
João Paulo Padilha de Aquino yea its a nice little display. Open it up look for the sticker or barcode label it'll have like 15 numbers and letters and then look them up. Who knows it could be a LG or Samsung made display. Not all China is crap
I'm working on a project like that, got the design, just waiting for the controller now... should be here next week
i did the same thing on my dell laptop and it works just fine (actually i was trying to repaste the cpu and gpu but i broke the screen cable or something accidentally...) and now i don't have to spend another $1000 for a new laptop
ETS2 Ricky you can get a video cable for less than $10
Hi, i have a question..
Do you need to set up in bios the primary monitor? Because my laptop is using hdmi as 2nd screen
This looks gold.
Phil that looks like some fancy 80's home micro!
Back at the end of the 2000s i did the same thing(ish) with my laptop. My problem was that the heat pipe decided not to function anymore so until a new one arrived. I had taken the laptop apart and mounted 2 standard PC heat sinks to the cpu and the one other chip that had the heat pipe in the first place, hook up a screen keyboard and mouse. And the faces of friends was priceless when they saw my Frankenstein of a PC.
Haha, yea a few comments mentioned this. I should turn this into an emulator machine or something...
You got yourself a modern micro computer! =)
thanks for this video man i have an old laptop with a broken screen lying around this would be good idea
would be cool to get a small desktop case and make it into a real desktop
Yea that's also a fun project idea. I do like that this has the kayboard and trackpad ready to go, so it's super quick to setup and get going.
sounds like a fun idea
I like your style of games. Especially need for speed underground. Used to spend hours a day playing that on my Xbox original :D never even thought of getting it as a PC game until now, so thumbs up for that. Very interesting video, might try it if one of the screens on my older laptops die.
literally,a all in one from 8,90's but with modern hardware
I was building a bunch of laptops from spare parts, and had a few parts left over I couldn't make into a full laptop, so I made it into this sort of thing.
It has S-Video and HDMI out, so I use it to connect to the television, with the base as a sort of keyboard/controller, making it a sort of plug and play. It has a trackpoint mouse in the keyboard so I don't need an external mouse to play games well.
It's great for windows XP gaming on the TV, with a dedicated HD5450 and a dual core first gen i5.
For WiFi, i didn't have any spare mpcie cards left, so I used one of the USB ports for a little cheap WiFi adapter.
ahhh the good old woolies blue toolkit :) i got one of them for work! so useful for the price
if that lcd isn't borked you can get a kit to convert that lcd into a desktop monitor as well
Older video of yours I know but this setup looks so clean for a laptop missing it’s screen. It looks as if it’s suppose to be an all in one type of computer haha
great phil - zero waste
i did that to an old laptop that i had but i have take the screen but in my case i use a external keyboard and mouse...work wonders!
Ha I love it. You are set for your next retro LAN party.
Thanks man! really helpful!
I almost did this when my netbook with an atom D525 screen finally broke off, but it turned to be completely useless like that.
I couldnt use wifi at all without its antenna (that sadly was ripped off in half when the screen broke so i couldnt even connect it back to have wifi) then I decided to simply disassemble it, throw what wasnt working in the trash and sell/reuse some of its parts.
Im still using its HDD and (believe it or not) its screen on another laptop.
I feel like youtube is watching me....im doing this literally right NOW!
Did the same because the screen busted a nut, intel hd 2500 graphics cannot run csgo in 2018.
maybe Crysis!! lol
You sure? My intel hd 400 graphics and my celeron craptop can run it at 15 fps meaning that whatever cpu you have should be able to get at least 30fps if not more
RustyX2010 You beat me to it! I was in the middle of typing "but can it run Crysis" when i read your comment. XD
@@cruzmatt22 30fps is "can run" only for console peasants, but not for competitive PC gaming.
@@marsovac csgo isn't only comp, maybe some people who can't afford gamer pcs have a laptop for playing with bots or something.
I have a headless laptop i bought with a broken lcd for parts for a identical system i have and i had enough parts to make a system like yours. Mine lives under my tv and lets me browse the web play x86 games emulators etc stream netflix hulu and I can use it to access my networked movies and 90s tv show collection its super handy.
I tried to replace the microswitch for one of the paddle shifters on my old Logitech Driving Force Pro.
Thanks to hand tremors, I can't solder decently at all. I ended up breaking traces and knocked out the D-pad. Only down on the D-pad worked afterwards.
I have done done some successful projects since then. Including replacing a bad cap in an LCD monitor that had power issues. I still have the wheel in my loft, but I have moved onto a G27. Which I have modded to add rumble to the pedals. That worked first time. Which was a bonus!
Thanks for posting this. As sad as it was for me here's a funny story.
I had just bought a new gaming laptop and I was so excited that I stayed up all night playing games. I fell asleep while playing and and once I woke up I was laying on it and the screen was completely destroyed. I have a 108p monitor so it wasn't much of a problem but the screen was becoming an inconvenient waste of space so I was wondering if I could just kinda snap it off but was scared it would mess something up with the cpu itself.
So thank you, now I can do this without worry.
This is actually awesome. You could definitely use it with a portable projector lol.
that is pretty cool . you can it has everything you need , if you don't want to use a mouse or extra keyboard but with the option to do so if you wanted to.
*This is actually pretty amazing because I thought my laptop was done, and I was going to just throw it away, but then I found this video, tried it and it all worked. And it wasn't even that hard to do!!!* #Subscribed.
This is great! If only the two laptops I have here had problems on their screens and not their motherboards... :|
Oh, cool, it's now the best built-in-keyboard pc ^^
simple, amazing and brilliant!
I once had a Gateway 17" laptop where the LCD failed, and amusingly, disconnecting the LCD connector broke all sort of things. For example, it became impossible to enter BIOS setup with the LCD detached.
Yea another viewer mentioned this, but at least with this one, I can access the BIOS just fine!
On mine, it didn't merely open invisible... it wouldn't even *try* to open. It would just ignore the keypress to enter setup.
That looks like it would be a good thrift store/swap meet/flea market buddy to be able to test displays on the spot, assuming there is a handy outlet for the display (in my experience most thrift and inside swap meets do.) Because of it's repair status, it's less likely to get stolen or if it breaks it's less of a loss.
A bit offtopic comment, but Chuwi is a cool name.. makes me think about chewbacca from Star Wars.
Anyway, very nice video and guide in how to go about this. this will be very handy indeed.
Cool video! I like how you used the keyboard. I have a Dell with first gen i7, full size keyboard and dedicated nvidia GPU. I have a dock for it too with dual outputs for DVI and DP and it drives my ultrawide at full ultrawide (current work laptop with Intel GPU won't). If the screen fails on my, yes I'll use it as a desktop but I never thought about using it's own keyboard. P.S. Its a Latitude E6530, usually under $200 USD. Think of it as high-end retro that is probably overlooked for a good price. Works flawlessly under Win10 too.
*Watching through comments at the beginning of the video.
*watch back video around halfway to the end
*WHERE'S THE LAPTOP SCREEN?😂😂😂
That would actually be a cool idea to make an all-in-one PC. You could get some double sided tape or velcro and stick the laptop and all the wires behind our monitor.
Used this to turn an old Sony laptop I got for free with a broken screen I'm to a torrent box and media player with mint and pia just stick it behind the TV. Thanks for the video.
If it looks stupid but works it ain't stupid :D
Some laptops aren't like that with the Wifi, you might have to buy an antennae and an adapter to get a full size external one. You might be able to glue in the big end of a full size adapter, or make holes for them to where you might even get better reception than stock.
I have an old (circa 2011) Toshiba C650D that was placed foolishly on the floor by me. Either myself or my dear wife stepped on it and broke the screen. I had never before attempted a laptop repair so I had to research the procedure for screen replacement. I fund a superb walk through that basically held my hand and guided me through the inevitable mine field. The intricate process of removing the display from the enclosure and the 40 pin connector worried me the most but it was ultimately not so nerve wracking.
I would wonder if your screen has some sort of flaw or failure involved with the connector as these are rather frail bits of kit and could easily come dislodged or otherwise damaged. Worth a tear down even if just to recover the display.
I have two of these laptops whithout screen and the work pretty good
I bought a Fujitsu Lifebook, an older one with a Centrino, or a core solo. The ebay listing said it was overheating and I bought a new tube of thermal paste. So i pay the 25-30 bucks and it gets here, and it did overheat. So I took it apart like I normally do, cleaned the vents and put fresh paste on. I put it back together using the same parts and nothing happened. A google search revealed that Fujitsu added a fail safe where if you open the laptop it scrambles something inside and the only way to get it repaired would be to send it back to the company. Fortunately it wasn't a huge loss and i know not to open fujitsu hardware XD
Man that's BS from them to do something like that.
Yeah but that's a business laptop for you, gotta include that anti-tampering stuff.
thankyou this saved me a lot of money
that is nice i possible buy 1 for play arcade emulator remove the lcd to play in crt tv and my big tv
Nice build.. Sir
Nice sir thanks for idea
I did this a while back with a Compaq Presario 1245 (K6-2 333) that had a funky screen. Great laptop for DOS BTW as it has a built in ESS audio chip that works with 98% of DOS games plus built in stereo speakers. Also replaced the slow 4200RPM HD with a SD card.
It's like a modern take on the old Commadore Amiga machines! I like it! :)
Yea it looks pretty slick. It would easily run a ton of emulators, like for the Amiga and others.
I should do this with my old laptop - i5 with 8gb ram and GeForce Graphics so not too bad.
Reminds me of the old home computers like Commodore 64s (naturally) having everything effectively built into the keyboard.
Phil,
Let’s see a Q6600 rig.
Overclock it with the tape method lol.
Man i remember doing this with my Acer 5742 when the screen broke.
good times.
Then i built my first apu pc with used parts, 80gb hdd still lasted me for so long until it sadly broke. rip windows xp hdd.
that's a real good idea! i have an old laptop with a broken screen and plugged it up to a monitor but tried to update it and its never worked since, have you got any ideas on what i could do? as it still powers on when i plug the charger in just a black screen when hooked up to a monitor.