I’ve gone this route! Anything with a busted screen is fair game to me, though I haven’t picked up any recently, mostly just tiny/mini/micros (and heavy on the lenovo tiny).

But a custom hacked up laptop can be a great option especially with tight space to work with

Edit: I’m surprised I missed your original post! I did the same, though what I reused was first a lenovo tiny, more recently updated with a digital signage player I picked up that I swapped parts out on - way more fun than a standard console imo!

I’ve been pondering doing this to a broken iMac I’ve got.

It got donated to me by someone who needed to thin out his studio a bit, so it didn’t cost me a penny. But I took the screen off to give it a clean out and repaste, apparently didn’t tape it in place securely enough as a temporary measure, so the screen fell off. And smashed.

I did some swearing.

However, it’s still a surprisingly handy spec. 3.5ghz i5, 24gb RAM and a Radeon GPU. So I’ve been wondering about pulling the guts and turning it into a desktop, then making it my home server to replace the 2014 Mac mini I currently use.

ponderings intensify

Watch this guy’s video. He DIY restores a smashed iMac screen: www.youtube.com/watch?v=7FStfdGjAwc

I still have my black Core 2 duo Black Macbook, it’s cut to a 4th of its size, a magnet is stuck near the lid sensor and it outputs video from the port on the side.

I mean it used to output, I haven’t tried turning it on in like a decade

I’ve literally been considering exactly this for a media center. I already have a server built put of an old tower, but it’s got limited specs and I don’t want to bog down the other stuff running a gui and all that.

I thought about replacing the entire bottom part of the laptop, but then I looked at the screw layout and thought this is way too much effort for not much benefit. I am not lacking in rack space so I am okay with it being bulky.

This can give you a single, more compact unit with all the parts inside.

what if i want a multiplex, larger unit with several parts outside? can this help me accomplish that too?

Since this is DIY, you can fuck it up as badly as you want. The possibilities are endless!

@cRazi_man @selfhosted My kind of retirement project. The only problem is that time is not endless and they won’t tell me the deadline.