Hacker Challenge Winner: Turn Your Old Laptop Into a Tablet
By
Walter Glenn
3/04/13 4:00PM
In last week's Hacker Challenge, we asked you to share your best DIY laptop hack. We received some great entries, but the winning hack shows us some clever ways to use those old or broken laptops.
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Hacker Challenge: Share Your Best DIY Laptop Hack
Welcome, Lifehackers, to our next Hacker Challenge! Each week, we issue a new challenge. You get
Read moreCheck out the description of the winning entry below and read about some of our other favorite entries.
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Winner: Turn Your Old Laptop Into a Tablet
About a year ago, Mattia received a netbook with a broken screen from a friend. Since he was interested tablets and willing to get his hands dirty, Mattia decided that rather than just replace the screen, he'd try to turn the whole thing into a tablet. After finding a capacitive touchscreen that fit, and doing a lot of under-the-hood adjustment, Mattia now has a nice-looking tablet dual-booting Windows 7 and Windows 8. For those interested in the specs, his tablet boasts a 1.8GHz single-core processor, 2 GB RAM, and a 250 GB hard drive. The battery runs about four hours on a charge.
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Honorable Mentions
We got a lot of great entries and we'd be remiss if we didn't share some of our favorites. Here are some of the entries that really impressed us.
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Build a Laptop Suitcase
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After the case between his laptop's screen and body broke, Guillaume decided he needed something a little cooler. He disassembled the computer entirely and rebuilt it inside a briefcase. Right now, it uses wood, copper, aluminim, and LEGO trim, but Guillaume's next step is figuring out how to build a water-cooling solution into the mix. We say a couple of switches, flashing LEDs, and a nuclear-code style key, and he'll be all set!
Image by lovelihood.
Turn Your Laptop Into a Wall-Mounted Command Center
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Sam's Acer Extensa 5630 was starting to fall apart. After buying a new laptop, he decided to turn the old laptop into a wall-mounted control center. He took the computer apart and reassembled it into a custom-built control center. Right now, Sam uses it to display information like weather, time, reminders, what song is playing, and so on. It also serves as his always on server since it consumes less power than his PC. You can read more about how Sam made the conversion on his blog.
Turn Your Laptop Lid Into a Case
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Tclarke decided that his ideal laptop case was actually his laptop. The back of his laptop features storage for an iPad Mini, trackpad, smart pen, memo pad, and more. He even designed the placement of the iPad Mini case so that it can swing out while the laptop is in use so that the iPad Mini can become a second screen. You can read more about his ideas on his blog.
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A big thanks to everyone who took the time to send us entries! Be sure to check back every week for a new challenge.
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