Old Laptop as picture/weboage viewer?

[bzand]

Sorry for not being very clear in the question, I don't know exactly how to state it. Anyways I was wondering if this would be a good practical idea. I have an old Inspiron 2600 with 128mb ram. 20gb harddisk. (Can use usb as storage) They keyboard is shot along with the screen cable. Would it be worth wild to disasemble the pc and mod it into a picture/webpage viewer/clock for around my house. I would basically remove the floppy and cdrom remove board from case, and remove other unnecasary stuff(speakers,keyboard,touchpad,etc) and reconfigure it so screen is mounted ontop of board and can be hung on the wall. I will use an external keyboard and mouse (or before disassembling) to install and set it all up.I was wondering if it is possible to wire the laptop screen to a vga cable to use the laptops vga output(not worth buying a new cable for inside) and what a good os would be I would most likely just make a webpage with what I want andkeep it runnifng on the laptop or maybe make a powerpoint type thing that would have pictures and clocks and say my last name scroll through(any alternatives to powerpoint?). And no the laptop doesn't have a wirless card I may buy one of them if I want or just use ethernet

 

[hang-the-9]

128 MB is very limited RAM for any modern OS, even light versions of Linux may have issues with that. You can wire the screen to a regular VGA output but you need an adapter which will cost more than the internal cable you don't want to get. Overall, you can play around with it if that is the goal to get the display working, but as far as it being worth doing to get the function of a digital picture display, no, it's not. You can get an actual LCD frame for pictures for about what you will spend in parts if not cheaper. Worth it for the fun if you want to play around with it of course.

 

[bzand]

128 MB is very limited RAM for any modern OS, even light versions of Linux

Yes I know! Thats why I though to do something like this to it. Get its final use. I read a page with how to concert the lcd and saw that the adaprer is expensive a cable is atleast $20 cheaper butwhy put money into this old junk. I though a custom made viwer is cooler looking and the value of you doing it yourself is great. Why is the vga such a diffrent source I thought vga was the old standard of pc displays. I may be able to rig a cable up though haven't looked into it