What can I do with an old laptop?

[GammaQuantum]

Hello,

I have an older Laptop with the following specs:

• AMD Athlon XP-M 2800+ (2.13 GHz)
• 512 MB RAM
• Savage S3 Savage4 Pro (32 MB) Card (apparently not supported by Ubuntu 9.10)
• 40 GB HDD
• LAN, WLAN, BlueTooth
• 15" screen with 1024*768 pixels

It has a very loud an annoying fan and does not have a battery any more. So it is basically not a laptop but a mobile desktop computer now. It can be disassembeled and put into a different case or something ...

I thought about building an internet terminal out of it, or a little tv.

Would it be possible to make it completely silent, with a CF Card instead of a hard drive and no fan but heatsinks? Could that be coverd with $50?

Thanks for any ideas!

[cascade9]

The S3 savage is suppoted. Prety rare card, but it has a package-

http://packages.ubuntu.com/karmic/xs...g-video-savage

Passive cooling is probably not possible. Maybe, if you can underclcock the CPU (not likely with most laptops). You might be able to get a quieter fan, the stock fans tend to be pretty loud.

Using a CF card (or a USB stick, but not a good idea if yuo only have USB 1) is pretty easy.

Moving the guts of a laptop into a different case is....well....a right pain, at best.

[Fafler]

Start by cleaning the fan. It might be full of dustpuppies and working much too hard to cool it. If it doesn't work, look for another. Or underclock, like cascade9 said.

You can get 44 pin IDE to CF converters dirt cheap of eBay and use a CF card in the harddrive bay.

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/CF-to-2-5-44-P...item2559107db1

[GammaQuantum]

Okay, I think I will let it in its current case. I took it a part a bit and cleaned the fan, but it is pretty small, so it is no surprise that it has a lot of rpm to cool down the laptop.