Apologies for the cross post, but thought that I should share this here. I had an old Dell inspiron 4000 whose lid hinge was broken, but otherwise mostly funtional. So I ripped the whole casing off, removed the optical drive and battery and chucked it on my noticeboard. I now use it all the time for quickly checking email or reading the news. If you have an old laptop gathering dust and a bit of spare wall real estate, its pretty damn easy to do. It could probably be made to look a little less gutsy, but personally I think this look adds some character... Has anyone else done anything similar?
nice mount but id hate having to stand up everytime i wanted to use the computer. maybe if there was a desk infront of it or a nice wireless keyboard it would be pretty sweet. but nice job none the less.
Hey, nice one. I'd slap a bit of plexi over it to protect the delicate bit (perhaps a bit of strategic etching, a few LEDs) but I think it's definitely cool to have the inards visible. If you use it just for some casual surfing, you could add a virtual laser keyboard just underneath the inards, to project the keyboard on the shelf below. Now that would be cool!
Yeah, a bit of protection wouldn't go astray. If you look at one of those photos, you'll notice some juggling balls - they have a tendency to go flying around the room with varying degrees of force. so far I haven't broken anything important...yet. but this would be a prime candidate now there's an idea! don't know if my wallet would agree though first of all I need to get a USB2 PCMCIA card - it currently only has one USB1 port, which is pretty limiting as for standing up, if it was going to be anything else other than checking my mail and possibly a quick reply, or checking a couple of rss feed - I would definitely chuck on my desktop. The problem is that I like having a computer on most of the time for easy access, but my desktop's aural output is not that conducive to things like studying or listening to music.
but that will only give me more ports at the speed of USB 1.....so slow! I think I'll end up getting the USB2 card as well as a hub - one can never have too many USB ports
how did you get the parts to stay on the wall also i may do the same thing but actally build it into the wall with a bit of perspax over the innings what do you reckon
I just used the screw shafts that held the keyboard in place - they went straight through the whole thing and were distributed nicely so as to take the weight. Plus it's on a noticeboard, so screwing into the cork makes it pretty easy. I think the persex is a good idea, but building it into the wall sounds like a lot of effort. If you've got the time and energy to do it, and it seems feasibile - go for it! If you want to make it more protected that might be a good way to go. Also you'd want check that whatever you do, you've got easy access to it for upgradding/adding stuff.
Wow this is a nice idea, I think I'll do something like that but on the wall, and it could be used as well as a "dynamics" picture frame. You gave me loads of idea, I can't believe I didn't think of it before with that old laptop sleeping on my computer case.
If you want to use it it as a photo frame, then depending on how adventurous you are, you could think about about extending the cord from the screen to the rest of it which you could place out of the way. This would lend itself to the picture frame idea. Here's a thread about it: http://forums.bit-tech.net/showthread.php?t=86299 As you can see, I put that in the too much effort category.
In case anyone else finds this and is thinking about doing something similar, I thought I'd add a few other pointers that I've worked out since I set this up. First of all, it soon became apparent to me that a normal mouse - even a wireless one - was just impractical. So I hacked the touchpad out of the shell of the laptop and stuck it on, which was pretty easy to do as the connectors were very accessible. Also, if your laptop has region sensitive touchpad software, that makes things much easier. If the touchpad is not an option for some reason I think a mouse with the thumb ball (whatever its called) stuck on the wall would do the job just as well - maybe even better. The second thing is that you need to make sure there is plenty of standing space in front of the wall. I guess this seems obvious, but if you look at the first photo, there's actually a filing cabinet in disguise sitting underneath it, and even sitting sideways it started to make my back hurt from standing too far out from the wall. The bookshelf that my brother happened to be throwing out from his room does a much better job Lastly, if you want to turn it into your music source; I went with a pretty customisable RF remote control which you can see pictured. That combined with Autohotkey, a fully fledged scripting/hotkey language for Windows that I tend to do most of my scripting in, gives me pretty much the ability to do anything I want on the computer with the remote.
