Post-rampocalyptic Chip-Swap Provides Desktop Memory At Laptop Prices

January 27, 2026 by 21 Comments

When you can buy something at a low price in one location, and sell it at a higher price somewhere else, you’re engaged in what economists call “arbitrage”. We’re not sure if desoldering DDR5 chips from laptop SO-DIMMs to populate a custom PCB to create much-more-expensive desktop memory counts as arbitrage, but it certainly counts as a hack. [VIK-on], who built the cards, claims he’s getting DDR5 performance at almost DDR3 prices. Nice!

Installed, the RAM apparently works well, though [VIK-on] has not shared benchmarks.
Specifically, he’s put together a 32 GB UDIMM from donor chips from two 16 GB SO-DIMMs. The memory chips themselves aren’t enough to make a stick of RAM, however: the part where we wish we had more details was in the firmware. The firmware identifies this DIY DIMM as an ADATA AX5U6500C3232G-DCLARWH, specifically. [VIK-on] is still performing stability tests, if those go well, we’re told to expect a how-to guide.

[VIK-on] is in Russia, so SO-DIMM rates may differ in your local market, but he claims walkaway costs of 17,015 ₽ — about $218 or €188, an astounding price for DDR5 in these dark days.

Some say soldering SIMMs seems severe, but hardly strange to Hackaday, and desperate times call for desperate measures. It’s ether that or optimize software, and who wants go to that effort?

Project Fail: Cracking A Laptop BIOS Password Using AI

January 15, 2026 by 52 Comments

Whenever you buy used computers there is a risk that they come with unpleasant surprises that are not of the insect variant. From Apple hardware that is iCloud-locked with the original owner MIA to PCs that have BIOS passwords, some of these are more severe than others. In the case of BIOS passwords, these tend to be more of an annoyance that’s easily fixed by clearing the CMOS memory, but this isn’t always the case as [Casey Bralla] found with a former student-issued HP ProBook laptop purchased off Facebook Marketplace.

Maybe it’s because HP figured that locking down access to the BIOS is essential on systems that find their way into the hands of bored and enterprising students, but these laptops write the encrypted password and associated settings to a separate Flash memory. Although a master key purportedly exists, HP’s policy here is to replace the system board. Further, while there are some recovery options that do not involve reflashing this Flash memory, they require answers to recovery questions.

This led [Casey] to try brute-force cracking, starting with a Rust-based project on GitHub that promised much but failed to even build. Undeterred, he tasked the Claude AI to write a Python script to do the brute-forcing via the Windows-based HP BIOS utility. The chatbot was also asked to generate multiple lists of unique passwords to try that might be candidates based on some human guesses.

Six months later of near-continuous attempts at nine seconds per try, this method failed to produce a hit, but at least the laptop can still be used, just without BIOS access. This may require [Casey] to work up the courage to do some hardware hacking and erase that pesky UEFI BIOS administrator password, proving at least that apparently it’s fairly good BIOS security.

Building A Commodore 64 Laptop

December 15, 2025 by 31 Comments

What might a laptop version of the Commodore 64 have looked like if one had been released by the late 1980s? This is the question that [Kevin Noki] tried to recently answer with a custom C64 laptop build.

While technically you could argue that Commodore’s SX-64 could be construed as a ‘portable’ system, its bulky format ensured that it was only portable in the sense that a 1980s CRT-based oscilloscope is also portable. Sadly, this turned out to be the last real attempt by Commodore to make a portable non-PC compatible system, with the ill-fated Commodore LCD project never making it out of development. We can, however, glean from this some design hints of what Commodore’s designers had in mind.

Interestingly, [Kevin] decided to instead use the Macintosh Portable as inspiration, with adaptations to make it look more like a breadbin C64. One could have argued that the C64C’s design would have worked better. Regardless, an enclosure was 3D printed, with parts glued together and metal dowels added for support.

For the guts, a custom keyboard with a new PCB and FDM printed keycaps was used, with a Raspberry Pi Pico as keyboard controller. We would here cue the jokes about how the keyboard controller is more powerful than a C64, but the real brains of this laptop come in the form of a Raspberry Pi 5 SBC for running the Vice C64 emulator, which blows a C64 even further out of the water.

This choice also means there’s no direct compatibility with genuine C64 peripherals, but a workaround involving many adaptors and more MCUs was implemented. Sadly, cartridge compatibility was sacrificed due to these complications. The resulting innards can be glimpsed in the above screenshot to give some idea of what the end result looks like.

Of course, this isn’t the first time a Commodore 64 laptop has been created; [Ben Heck] used a C64C mainboard and an original keyboard back in 2009. This meant direct compatibility with all peripherals, including cartridges. Hopefully, now that Commodore as a company has been revived, it will pick up on ideas like these, as an FPGA-based C64 or C128 laptop would be pretty rad.

Thanks to [fluffy] for the tip.

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Recreating The Destroyed Case Of LGR’s Rare 1980s Laptop

November 9, 2025 by 4 Comments

A while back [Clint Basinger] of Lazy Game Reviews fame purchased a rare 1980s Halikan laptop. When he received the parcel, at first glance, everything seemed in order. Upon opening the original laptop bag, however, it was found that the combination of the heavy power supply in a side pocket and the brittle plastic of the laptop’s case had turned the latter into sad fragments of regret. At the time [Clint] wasn’t sure what he’d do, but fortunately [polymatt] stepped in with the joyful news: we can rebuild it; we have the technology.

Obviously, the sad plastic fragments of the original case weren’t going together again in any meaningful way, nor would this have been helpful, but the pieces, along with photos of an intact laptop, helped with the modelling of a digital model of the case. One model and one 3D printer is all you need. For this case, the print used ABS, with gaps between the segmented prints filled with an ABS slurry, as the case was too large to be printed without jumping through some hoops.

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Mini Laptop Needs Custom Kernel

September 29, 2025 by 12 Comments

These days, you rarely have to build your own Linux kernel. You just take what your distribution ships, and it usually works just fine. However, [Andrei] became enamored with a friend’s cyberdeck and decided that he’d prefer to travel with a very small laptop. The problem is, it didn’t work well with a stock kernel. So, time to build the kernel again.

Of course, he tried to simply install Linux. The installer showed a blank screen. You might guess that you need to add ‘nomodeset’ to the kernel options. But the screen was still a bit wacky. [Andrei] likens troubleshooting problems like this to peeling an onion. There are many layers to peel back, and you are probably going to shed some tears.

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Making A Laptop With A Mechanical Keyboard

September 16, 2025 by 16 Comments

A laptop is one of the greatest tools at the disposal of a hacker. They come in all manner of shapes and sizes with all manner of features. But perhaps the greatest limit held by all laptops is their chiclet keyboard. While certainly serviceable, a proper mechanical keyboard will always reign supreme, which is why [flurples] built a laptop around a mechanical keyboard. 

Such a keyboard could not fit inside any normal laptop, so a custom machined case was in order. The starting point was a standard Framework Laptop 13. Its open source documentation certainly helped the project, but numerous parts such as the audio board and fingerprint sensor are not documented making for a long and tedious process. But the resulting machined aluminum case looks at least as good as a stock Framework chassis, all be it, quite a bit thicker.

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The top surface of a laptop cooler is visible. It consists of a black plastic mesh with thirteen fans visible behind it, with a blue backlit screen at the bottom of the cooler. There is blue LED backlighting behind each fan, and around the border of the cooler.

Making A Smarter Laptop Cooler

July 2, 2025 by 18 Comments

[Bogdan Micea] uses a laptop cooler, but was a bit annoyed that his cooler would run at the same power no matter how hard the laptop was working. Rather than keep adjusting the cooler’s power manually, he automated it by installing an Arduino Pro Micro as a controller in the cooler and writing a Rust controller application for his computer.

[Bogdan]’s cooler is controlled by four buttons, which can have different functions depending on how long they’re pressed. After mapping out their functionality and minor quirks, [Bogdan] soldered four transistors in parallel with the buttons to let the Arduino simulate button presses; another four Arduino pins accept input from the buttons to monitor their state. The Arduino USB port connects to the cooler’s original USB power input, so the cooler looks superficially unchanged. When the cooler starts up, the Arduino sets it to a known state, then monitors the buttons. Since it can both monitor and control the buttons, it can notify the computer when the cooler’s state changes, or change the state when the computer sends a command.

On the computer’s part, the control software creates a system tray that displays and allows the user to change the cooler’s current activity. The control program can detect the CPU’s temperature and adjust the cooler’s power automatically, and the Arduino can detect the laptop’s suspend state and control power accordingly.

Somewhat surprisingly, this seems to be the first laptop cooler we’ve seen modified. We have seen a laptop cooler used to overclock a Teensy, though, and a laptop’s stock fans modified.