After writing my last post about fostering your child’s inner geek, I developed a brainstorm to fix up an old laptop of mine and give it to my son’s friend Elijah. The hinges on it were cracked, and I had dreams for it to become a xubuntu steampunk laptop. Well, after some serious thought, I realized that I didn’t have the wherewithal to make a steampunk laptop, so off I went to Ebay to find an old Dell 5000e shell, which arrived in the mail two days ago. I eagerly unpacked the laptop carcass and went to work with my teensy little screw driver. The screen housing was carefully taken apart and replaced along with a new keyboard to boot. This model of Dell is very prone to cracked hinges. Even the replacement has hairline cracks on each side. It has an operational battery that holds a charge though — bonus!
