Converting that old laptop into a photo frame

So I got this laptop from a friend. The hinge between the lcd panel and body was completely broken, the power supply was lost, and he hadn't used it for "a while". He asked if I could rescue the content on the hard drive, then recycle the lap top. I rescued the data, and with a bit of effort was able to get the machine to boot.

 

This is when I thought of the "digital picture frame - gift for mom" idea. My original idea was to have the machine boot from a flash device, as that would provide silent operation - but alas, I was not able to set the bios to boot from a removable drive.
My next approach was to have the machine boot but do all photos from a flash drive, and set the drive to spin down with minimal interval. This is the option I used.

 

Now to put it in a frame.

 

I bought a "shadow box" & mat at Michaels - less than $15 for both! ( I won't mention that I did this twice,, breaking the first frame accidently) For this display an 8x10 opening in a pre-cut mat seemed to fit the lcd panel pretty well.

 

I stripped the plastic off the lcd panel ( on the display side) and hot glued it to the matting - the matting was hot glued into the frame.

 

I then had to cut a bunch of the case away on the laptop body to get it to fit in the 12x14 shadow box frame. I used a dremel cutting wheel and removed much of the front and back of the laptop body. This also allowed the short vid cables to reach their sockets for vid and power.

 

I used Velcro strips to stick the body to the back of the lcd panel. This allowed for removal, but once set kept it basically static.

 

I secured the loose bits ( speakers, touch pad, etc ) with hot glued to keep them from flopping around.

 

The machine boots win98 ( I thought about changing the startup sound to Hi Mom)

 

I am using a screen saver I wrote several years ago - very light, only works on win 98 & 2000.

 

To provide external access to the 'power' button, I poked a hole in the back right over this key. Pencil or anything small and pointed will allow on, off, reset.

 

The trickiest item was the 'previous picture' button. The screen saver supports hitting the page up button to go to previous picture. My family was adamant that this was a must have - so I needed an external switch on the frame. I looked at the electronics under the keys and was intimidated on doing a direct solder in key replacement. The solution I settled for was mechanical, using a paperclip, a bamboo rod, and some creativity. I exposed this "button" in a recessed hole in the top of the frame.

 

 

It worked great. Though it looks a bit spooky.

 

I added a cable so he usb flash drive would be on the outside for easy updates.

 

I sliced some vent holes in the back and declared victory.

 

The finished product looks as though I knew what I was doing.