Here's where the fun starts! The first step was to
remove the LCD. To do that, I had to remove the keyboard so
I could unplug the two LCD cables (one for power, one for
data). This model, like most Dells, is easy to disassemble.
Just remove the screws in the bottom. They're often marked
"K" for keyboard, "B" for motherboard, "D" for display, and
"P" for palmrest. Since I knew I wanted to keep the
electronics super thin, I assumed I'd have to remove the
motherboard completely from the case so I just removed
every screw and tore it all apart. Notice that I have some
good lighting. Okay, maybe you can't tell but those lamps
use bright halogen bulbs and are very easily to position. I
don't know what I'd have done without those. They were
$2.50 each on clearance at Target after back-to-school last
year, by the way.
I noticed the first time I powered this system on
that the onboard CMOS battery was dead. I let it charge
overnight but it was still dead so I had to replace it.
Just by a stroke of luck, I happened to have the same
battery, though arranged in a different shape, on hand. All
I had to do is unplug the bad one (and recycle it -- it's
nickel metal hydride) and plug in the replacement. You can
see that it's a different shape but that doesn't matter at
all in my case since the motherboard is, well, not IN a
case. I used double-sided tape, the craft kind that's as
thin as regular invisible tape, to fix the battery to the
IDE connector.
I was going to unplug the microphone and speaker
(yes, just one speaker -- dumb Dell) but I decided to keep
them in the end. They're both very small so they weren't a
problem to fit into the final product. Who knows -- maybe
I'd like to someday make my picture yell out, "Hey! Answer
the phone! I know you're home, hun!" or maybe provide audio
surveillance while I'm away. If you notice them missing in
later pictures, fear not, I just had them unplugged while I
was working. They made it back into the final product.
Most of the motherboard was covered by a piece of
sheet metal. I removed this because the touchpad, which I
didn't need, although it's a pretty neat toy on its own,
was plugged into a socket under said sheet metal. What did
I find? Another RAM socket! The other is easily accessible
on the bottom of the laptop. This model is described by
Dell as having 128MB "onboard RAM", which I've always taken
to mean that it's soldered on the motherboard. Not so; it's
just hard to get to. Dumb Dell. I removed the thermal
compound that Dell had on the heatsink, which is part of
that metal shield, and applied some of my own in hopes that
it would conduct heat better than Dell's stuff and thus
prevent the fan from running so often. Turns out that it
didn't make a bit of difference, though. In the end I opted
for the simplest option: Don't stress the CPU! See the
software page for more on that.
Here's the motherboard totally liberated from its
casing. It's amazingly small. This is going to be easy. Um,
not quite.
Remember when I said I had some obstacles to
overcome? The first big one was that I could no longer
reattach the heatsink once the motherboard was removed from
the casing because the screws that go through the
shield/heatsink screw into threaded holes in posts on the
bottom of the case, which is made of cast aluminum. The
only solution I could come up with was to either leave the
motherboard in the bottom casing, which would make it too
tall/thick to fit behind my picture frame, or else hack
part of the casing off with a saw, a hacksaw, ideally, and
deal with part of the motherboard being thick later on.
That's what I did. Here's the hacked bottom casing. I
attached the shield without any more drama. This also
allowed me to mount the CPU fan back in its regular place
without any other modifications, which helped me avoid some
time-consuming modifications on that front.
The power switch was going to be a problem. It was
located on the motherboard's upper-left corner, which would
make powering on and off the machine very difficult once
the motherboard was mounted on the back of the frame. I had
no choice but to extend the switch. I bought a momentary
switch (actually a four pack) at RadioShack for $3.29. It
was important that I use a "Normally Open" switch for this
purpose as opposed to "Normally Closed". I am no expert
with a soldering iron so it took me a little while and some
nervous sweat to get that green wire soldered in place. I
determined which contact of the four was for the switch by
using a multimeter to touch each contact (the other lead
being on any grounded part of the motherboard) and pressing
the switch. When the resistance dropped significantly, I
knew I had the right solder point. The wire I used, by the
way, is one of the eight in a CAT5 network cable. To save
myself the headache of soldering the second lead, I cheated
and tightened it to the motherboard under a screw that went
down into that hacked part of the casing. It looks bad in
this picture but I later cleaned up the wire and
re-tightened the screw so it was pretty. With that in
place, I had two bare ends on the other end of the wires
that I could tap together to start the machine. I wouldn't
solder the switch in place until the end because the switch
will be mounted in the frame and I didn't want tho have to
keep the frame nearby.
Here's the beast powered up. After all that abuse, it still
works! Sorry I didn't take a better picture of it running.
You probably would rather see the motherboard than the LCD
and Paris but... too late now. It's just a laptop without a
case anyway. Nothing you haven't seen before.
If you have any choice in the matter, I recommend that you
do not use this model of laptop for making a digital
picture frame for the following reasons: The lack of
internal CD-ROM drive limits your options a bit. Its
motherboard screw holes are too small to easily work with.
It gets hot easily and has a noisy fan. The motherboard
itself emits a kind of scratching sound all the time,
though it's not too bad once it's mounted on the wall. The
LCD has two cables instead of one, which makes it difficult
to work with. The video chipset doesn't support OpenGL,
which is a problem for running some slideshows. The LCD has
no frame and is hard to handle once it's removed from its
casing. The bottom of the motherboard is not flat so it's
hard to mount to the flat backboard. Other than that,
though, it's great.
