10 cool things to do with your old laptop

While desktop PC sales have been steadily declining, sales of laptops have continued to increase over the past few years. However, although a PC can usually be given a new lease of life by easily upgrading its core hardware, the same is not usually true of an old laptop.

There are certain parts of a laptop that can be upgraded, if your laptop is over a certain age, but it will be difficult, and in many cases impossible, to do much with it to improve its performance. As such, you may feel it's time to consign it to the bin.

But wait, don't give up on it yet, as there are plenty of ways you can turn your old laptop into something far more useful again. The easiest way to get the most from your old system is to recycle the internal hardware, such as the memory, hard drive and, in some cases, even the processor.

However, this isn't the only thing you can do, as your trusty portable can even find a new lease of life when used alongside other devices in your home. It can bring improved usability to games consoles in your living room, or even be used to enhance other PCs that you or your family use. Whatever the case, there's no need to get rid of your old laptop just yet.

1. Salvage the hardware

If your laptop has fallen down the stairs, simply doesn't work, or you don't have the inclination to upgrade it, then you could instead salvage some of the parts. The hard drive is a logical choice, because with a USB caddy, which you can pick up on eBay for a few pounds, it is possible to quickly create an external, portable hard drive.

Depending on how much RAM is fitted, you may also be able to remove the memory sticks and use them in another laptop, or simply sell them on eBay. Both the hard drive and memory are easily removed from most laptops, with the use of a screwdriver, so even the least advanced user can get them out.

Another option is your laptop's optical drive. This could be used in a home theatre-style PC case that requires a slimline optical drive, converted to an external drive with a caddy, or sold as a spare part.

Finally, if you really want to tear the laptop to bits, you could try removing the CPU and monitor. You can sell both of these components as spare parts, but if you don't fancy getting rid of them, you could even make use of the monitor yourself (see tip number 2).

2. Reuse the monitor as a second screen

While it's technically possible to remove the screen from a laptop, all the electronics required to make the screen function as a monitor are built into the laptop's motherboard. To use it as a separate monitor, you would need to purchase a controller board, and connect this to the screen and your laptop or PC.

It's beyond the scope of this article to run through the procedure, but a MP3Car.com has good guide. If you're technically minded, it's a fun project.

The alternative is to use software to share your graphics card's output over the network. To do this, you can use a free piece of software called ZoneScreen.

3. Upgrade the hardware

While you might see a laptop as essentially non-upgradable, there are actually a number of things you can do to breathe new life into an old machine. If your laptop is simply struggling to run some of the latest programs, than a RAM upgrade may be in order.

Adding more memory to your laptop is one of the most cost-effective ways of giving it a real performance boost, and is also a very simple task to perform. Depending on the laptop model, you can install up to 4GB of RAM if using a 32-bit OS.

The memory is usually found under a panel on the laptop's underside, and there should be a couple of slots to hold the chips. Use a memory checker, such as the one at www.crucial.com/uk, to find out how much memory your laptop can handle, and what type you need.

Upgrading the hard drive will not only give you more storage space, it will probably speed up Windows and your applications, due to the faster speed at which drives now spin. You will need to back up all your data, or create an image of your drive beforehand; Paragon's Drive Backup 9.0 Express can do this for free.

You can also often upgrade your optical drive, if it's broken or you simply want to add a drive with more features. Even if you can't find an internal one to fit, external drives are relatively cheap and the portable ones are fairly unobtrusive. While it is technically possible to upgrade the CPU and graphics chips in laptops, they were never really designed with upgrading in mind.

You will need to take the entire laptop apart and find a suitable upgrade part. Not only that, but the cooling hardware for your current CPU may not be able to cope with an upgraded CPU. Still, you'll find plenty of laptop CPUs on eBay, should you wish to give it a go.

4. Replace Windows with Linux

Windows demands a lot from a laptop, especially Windows Vista, and many of the latest software applications will also struggle to run on older hardware. Linux is a lot less demanding, however, as are the applications that run on it.

A laptop that takes an age to boot Windows will seem like a thoroughbred racehorse in comparison when running a lightweight Linux installation. While Ubuntu may be the flavour of the month, it's starting to get a bit bloated, so why not try some slimline alternatives, such as Puppy Linux, Damn Small Linux or for the ultimate diet OS, give gOS a try.