Bruce A. Shields

A few years ago, I was at church and a friend of mine approached me and asked if I wanted her old Toshiba laptop because it wasn’t working and she was tired of fighting with it.

Of course, me being the Jawa that I am, never let good junk pass me up.  By the way, all junk is good junk in the hands of a Jawa.

So I got the laptop, and it was in great physical condition, with all the original case and everything.  So I was excited.

It wouldn’t boot up, and after testing, it appeared to be a bad hard drive.  So I jumped on eBay, and picked up another laptop hard drive, and it already had Windows Pro installed along with Microsoft Office XP, and I got it for about $20!  That includes shipping…

I installed the new hard drive, and everything ran great!

I then decided to mod the laptop…

You can see the Photo Album of that HERE…

It has worked great for me over the past couple years with no problem, until about 6 months ago.

The screen started acting funny, and it didn’t like the color black.  The more black that was on the screen, the more flicker it would get, and if there was a big portion of black, say 60% or more…good bye screen, it would turn pure white and wouldn’t come back unless I restarted the computer.

I finally got tired of this, and took the screen completely off yesterday.

Trying to decide if I wanted to actually pay for a new screen or not, I had a great idea.

I decided to turn the laptop into a media center on our TV in the front room!

So I connected a video/out from the laptop to the VCR inputs, so all we have to do to access the laptop on the TV screen is press the video button on the remote.

I then ran the headphone out to the VCR so we could hear whatever sounds the laptop is playing.

I installed an open source media center software called Media Portal, you can find them here.

The I took an external hard drive I had from a couple years back that was full of Clean Flicks movies (about 170 DVD’s worth)  some from Clean Flicks, and some from DVR off my TV, and attached that to the laptop.

I also connected the laptop wireless to our home network to access our pictures, music and internet.

So, now when I turn the laptop on, it starts the media center, and I can access all of our music, photo albums, internet, and movies on our front room TV.

Media Portal also allows you to customize the look, feel and operation of the software with mods, you can even connect to your incoming TV signal and DVR!

I like the cool local weather feature that allows me to see my local weather with one click.

My satellite does this as well, but operates a lot slower and takes longer than the laptop.

This is how I like to recycle!