'Reuse' Comes Before 'Recycle': Low Power Server from a Scrap Laptop

If you know literally anything about me, it's that I believe that computers are only useless when they're off. They're still capable of a lot - even the old ones - but only if they're on and working. So when I see perfectly good computers going to waste, I try and figure out something to do with them. This was the case with a Dell Latitude E4300 I found in the trash a little while ago.

Usually when someone throws a computer away, it's because it's broken in some way. Sometimes it's broken beyond repair and you have to pass it along to escrap, salvaging what little you can from it. Maybe the screen, maybe the optical drive, who knows. But if it's the motherboard that's broken, then you have little to no chance of recovering the system.

But that's fairly infrequent in my experience. So I plugged this one in to see if it would turn on. First try, booted up like a champ with the error "No Bootable Media Detected" because the hard drive was missing from this. Cool, so was this computer scrapped because it's old?

When I got to the Dell BIOS screen, I immediately saw the problem. The mouse cursor began to drift to the bottom left corner of the screen and then it stuck there. Interesting. My guess was that the joystick bit of the track point was bent inside. Whatever. I can live without a keyboard.

I thought it was interesting how the keyboard connected to the computer through the trackpad. I believe the four different colored pins on the right side of this connector are for the track point. So I could test that if I wanted. But, I digress.

I really appreciated the design and layout of this computer. It made it easy to service without digging all the way down to the motherboard.

I was tempted to take it all the way down to the motherboard, but then I stopped. If this was going to be a low power server, then what's the point of taking it out of its custom fit case? I took the screen off of it to ensure it wouldn't ever turn on by itself to waste more power.

Some laptops don't correctly enumerate screens after the built in one is removed, but this one did. So I could just slap an OS on this (I picked Ubuntu since I had a CD for it ready to go) and make it into a fairly low power server with decent compute capacity (4GB or RAM needs to be upgraded, but a Core2 Duo P9600 isn't terrible).

Okay, cool Tucker. You took a screen off of a laptop and called it a server. Why does that get its own blog post?

Two reasons. First, I didn't have a whole lot to write about this month. Second, and perhaps more importantly, it's to push this message and ideology I have that reuse is better than recycle 100% of the time. Sure, recycling electronics is better than nothing. But if you can breathe new life into them, it's so much better. Sometimes it's not worth it (they don't hold up to modern software, they draw too much power relative to their usefulness, etc). but many times - including this time - it is.

For now, it joins my server rack as one of the more power efficient device on it.