In 2012, I purchased myself a Gaming Laptop which was the Y400. At that time, it could handle everything. Recently while cleaning up I noticed the laptop was still in my store room collecting dust. Upon checking noticed the display was spoiled but everything else was working fine. So I thought to myself why not revive it and use it as a daily PC?
First thing was to add a 128GB mSATA SSD for the operating system (along with a 500GB HDD which came with the laptop) and also upgrading another stick of 8GB RAM to make the total RAM of 16GB. Since the screen was spoiled and replacement parts were either too expensive or non-existent, I decided to make the laptop headless (work without a display and connected to an external display via HDMI). After spending some time, I managed to remove the upper part of the screen / laptop leaving the WiFi/Bluetooth antenna’s intact. It came out rather nice. Just to make it even better looking, I pasted glow in the dark tape at the hinge so that everything looks even better. Results were satisfactory for me.
Next was to decide what OS to go with this 10 year old laptop, simple it had to be Linux! And the flavor I chose was ZorinOS (due to personal preference). Installed the OS to the SSD and added the 500GB HDD as a system storage as well, so they can work along together without issue. Setup went smooth and everything worked fine!
To be honest a laptop looks better without a screen, don’t ask me why but it just does look cooler. Now I have another laptop which is currently my daily driver and used for my daily tasks, light gaming and also for downloading media purposes. So how long will I use it on my desk? As long as it works!