Extreme Laptop Makeover: Second Life for the Portable Computer

When trying to do the right thing, and be ‘green’, few think about the problems associated with the small useful life of a laptop computer. So many people that own a laptop look at it as a complete consumable; something to be used, and when the first problem arises, thrown away and replaced.

Part of the problem tends to come from the perceived monolithic nature of the average laptop. The consumer sees an item of one piece, as opposed to the 3 pieces of the average desktop. The only ‘removable’ item from the laptop, in the eyes of the average user, is the battery – a very expensive part to replace, and one which replacement remains almost a voodoo ritual. By that I mean to say that the user looks at the exorbitant cost of the replacement from the OEM, and the prospect of the dubious quality of third party choices. Also part of the problem is the forced upgrade cycle of the ‘Wintel machine’ – between the code bloat of each iteration of Windows, and the envy factor of the latest and greatest Intel processor, the consumer feels the gentle force drawing the old laptop to the scrap heap.

The incomplete path to the recycler is also a problem for many, as the printed circuit boards may find their way to another life, but the case, usually being made of plastic, not easily recycled plastic, moves on its last journey to the landfill.

In an article in ComputerWorld, the the arcane, yet obvious process of upgrading a laptop, and the financial and ecological benefits are exposed.

My ThinkPad R50 just hit its fifth birthday, and the years haven’t been kind to it. When it was new, the notebook was reliable and fast, and it traveled with me to many places throughout the world.

Today, it’s slow and prone to annoying shutdowns. Plus, it has a broken key, its fan sounds like a 747 taking off, and the case looks like it went five rounds with Lennox Lewis. It can all be fixed, but is it a good investment to revamp a notebook that’s worth about $350?

It sure is, because I’m going to give this old notebook a new lease on life for about $125 — a bargain, considering what it would cost to replace.

I’ll show you how I cleaned it up, replaced its slow and overloaded hard drive, installed extra memory, replaced the keyboard, and gave it a software tuneup. Not one of these tasks took me more than 15 minutes to do; altogether they took around an hour.

While it’s all about reviving my ThinkPad R50, these techniques will work on just about any laptop. You’ll need to investigate where the RAM is stashed, what kind of hard drive it uses and how the keyboard is attached. If you haven’t backed up your data or defragged your hard drive lately, it could take you two or three hours longer than it took me, but it’s absolutely worth the time you’ll put into it.

When I finished my notebook rejuvenation, I benchmarked the system using FutureMark Corp.’s PCMark 05 tests to see how much extra performance I squeezed out of the old notebook. Turns out my little project yielded a very stable ThinkPad that performs 30% better than when I started. Here’s how I did it.

full article

After the TLC that this laptop is given, not only does it perform better than when it was new, it looks much better than a 5 year old piece of technology usually does. This is especially true of laptops, for the reason cited above – the fatalistic outlook that most take about these items.

With careful work, the notebook gets a new lease on life, and becomes another victory for the green warrior, giving lots of continued use to its owner.

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