You might have an unusable laptop lying around and gathering dust in a secluded corner of your room, and thinking about it every time might have made you wonder if it’s still good for anything else. Now is the time to shed that thought. Believe it or not, your laptop’s separate parts can be used to integrate into your desktop! Now your practical mind might be sending off warning signals as you read this, but remember that practicality has nothing to do with it. If you love hardware and take a Zen approach to it, this might be something that could benefit you as a computer hardware enthusiast.
HARD DRIVE
Laptops and desktops use the same interface, so there won’t be any difficulties in integrating your laptop hard drive into your desktop components. If your hard drive is using SERIAL ATA, you just have to pop it into your motherboard’s SATA data and power cables. If it’s IDE, using an adaptor should allow you to use your IDE laptop hard drive with the PC IDE cable.
LCD
This one will need some thinking over since the desktop uses analog display technology (VGA), while the laptop LCD’s are 100% digital. There is no way you can have communication between LCD and VGA since they are two different animals. In contrast, LCD’s can only accept the accurate digital input. There’s one way to make it work, but you will need to live with the fact that you have to purchase another adaptor, which is a bit expensive. Once you’ve made the decision to push through, you have to identify your laptop LCD’s model and manufacturer, then find the required adaptor for it. Like I said, it’s a bit expensive, so you might want to look for a cheap one on the internet.
Also take into consideration that the viewing angles of LCD monitors are a bit limited, which makes the integration into the desktop a bit awkward. So just make do with the most convenient viewing angle when you connect your LCD monitor into the desktop.
OPTICAL DRIVE
You can use your laptop’s optical drive with your PC, as long as your laptop is using an IDE based DVD drive. Just purchase a PC IDE converter to allow communication between the motherboard and the laptop’s IDE. If your PC has standard SATA cabling, a SATA optical drive should do the job. Building a home theater PC is no difficult task either if you have a slot loading laptop optical drive.
THINGS TO PONDER
You are also in luck if your laptop utilizes a wireless mouse or external optical drive, because you can automatically use this for your PC without any problem. Just remember that your laptop’s SO-DIMM RAM won’t work on the PC so it would be better if you just sell your laptop RAM and purchase a PC kit instead.
FINAL ANALYSIS
One major advantage is that power consumption can be reduced after you’ve integrated your laptop computer parts into your desktop. Further modifications can always be made, but that is a topic for another day. For now, enjoy your modified desktop, or laptop. Oh well, it’s up to you now!