I have an old laptop lying around, how can i take the screen and make it a book reader?
Posted Tuesday, January 5, 2010 by admin
Well, it’s as simple as this: i can’t afford an ebook reader (or electronic paper or whatever you want to call it) and i have a nice spare working LCD screen from an old laptop. Is there any way i can take it and use some sort of easy storage (pen drive) and convert it to a portable reader? Of course i don’t want anything fancy, just displaying .txt or maybe .doc will do fine.
I don’t think you can just take the monitor and use it as a gadget but if you have vista, you can rotate the screen and use it like a book
Quite easy. You will need the vga converter from the laptop motherboard. Unfortunately this requires the motherboard, which in turn requires the rest of the laptop. And no 2 motherboard /screen combinations are the same. I have a failed motherboard on one laptop, a cracked monitor on another of the same model with serial numbers about 10 apart. They use 2 different manufacturer’s screens, and the connectors on each screen are different. This means neither would work with the other motherboard. Also they both use totally different connections to the actual chips forming the driving part of the screen.
Short answer NO.
Long one: It may be possible, but you need advanced electronics knowledge, because the link between the screen and motherboard is not VGA.
If you take the motherboard with the screen is quite possible.
Another option: Why you do not use the old laptop as reader. Installing DOS on it will give you possibility to read text files. Or you may use a lightweight Linux distribution (like DSL, Puppy) if you need graphics and possibility to open .doc. If you have enough RAM (256M+) this may be the best option.