Best thing to do with an old laptop?

[subanta]

I had bought a laptop during my college. Early 2008(January, I think).
Here are the specifications.

I bought it for about $1200 dollars at that time in my country.

It sort of got spoilt about 1 year ago. (Blank screen with dos type cursor and long never ending pulsating beeps on power on). I tried changing rams. It didnt work.
I had kept it aside for many months and decided to try powering on on a freshly formatted hard disk and it came on! i hadd just finished installing windows on it(about 30 mins) when the same old issue came up. Long never ending beep. This was about 6 months back. Or more! I dont remember to well.
Since it isnt in warranty i didnt bother much, and frankly I didnt have the time to take it to any repair guy.

The thing is that a laptop with those specs in a perfectly working condition sould fetch about $200 dollars(in my country).

But the repairing cost is estimated $100 dollars for the motherboard (I think thats the problem). And if I had to sell it, I would have to buy a new battery too. About $100 dollars more!

LOL

I loved that laptop and junking it feels SO wrong! On another thought, I could repair it, not buy the battery and use it on direct AC and keep it as a downloading machine or something. Or maybe use Linux on it. But is it worth it?

My laptop has been lying around, dead for a long time because I cannot decide!
I have good gaming rig, and I dont need this laptop that much.

Can anyone come up with a brilliant suggestion. Or maybe an inhouse way to repair it!

 

[viewtyjoe]

If you're too cheap to repair, donate it to a service who will pay the $100 to fix it and give it a good home.

 

[velo3100]

As the price is the same to repair it and sell it, I personally would sell it as you don't seem to use it any more. You have a good gaming rig, I would use that and use the money that I got to upgrade it if I needed to . Otherwise the money is they when you need it.