Turning a laptop with broken screen into a barebone / HTPC

[Okjoek]

15-r082nr

http://support.hp.com/us-en/document/c04330958

A laptop by this model number has been on a shelf for ~ a year due to a damaged screen so I decided to see if I could re-purpose it. I've disassembled it carefully making sure not to damage any of the ribbon cables.

 

1.  unplugged the battery, but do I still need the battery if I intend to have it plugged directly into the wall from now on? My brother tells me that maybe you can jump the leads that the battery plugs into to fool it into thinking the battery is still there, but I wanted some extra opinions.

 

2. One idea I have is to find or modify a bigger heatsink for the CPU and get some thermal adhesive to mount it permanently. I do have some older intel stock heatsinks as well as some game console heatsinks.

 

3. As for my custom case I could use some ideas. I was considering an NES color/design scheme, but that might be kind of cliche. I mean I could have just left it all in the laptop's body, but I want to make it mine and give it its own personality.

[W-L]

On 2/16/2017 at 4:59 PM, Okjoek said:

-SNIP-

You should have no issues running the system just off of wall charger, as for the cooler your going to need to make some custom mounts for it to apply proper pressure. 

[Okjoek]

5 hours ago, W-L said:

You should have no issues running the system just off of wall charger, as for the cooler your going to need to make some custom mounts for it to apply proper pressure. 

I just reattached the original cooler with the future possibility of using thermal adhesive (the stuff like Linus put in one of his videos near the end of last year) to add more heatsink to the copper pipe of the cooler.

 

One other issue I ran into was that the mounting holes I would normally use for standoffs are too small for any screw or bolt thread to fit through.

[W-L]

5 hours ago, Okjoek said:

I just reattached the original cooler with the future possibility of using thermal adhesive (the stuff like Linus put in one of his videos near the end of last year) to add more heatsink to the copper pipe of the cooler.

 

One other issue I ran into was that the mounting holes I would normally use for standoffs are too small for any screw or bolt thread to fit through.

You'll probably need to source some really small M3 or M2 bolts then as most use very small hardware compared to regular desktop mounting.