[th0mas] has a fun guide to modifying the boot image in your BIOS. This could very easily brick your laptop, but it’s interesting to see how it’s done. He starts by dumping the plain text strings. The magic number for bitmap format appears in the file so he copies a large chunk of data starting at that point. th0mas opens this in MSPaint to maintain the format. After modifying the image it’s placed back in the BIOS file and a couple checks are performed to make sure only the image data has changed. The final section involves running the flash utility in a debugger to find where it checks the CRC. By modifying the program he can then flash the image without the program complaining.

Continue reading “Reverse Engineer Your BIOS” →

Follow along as reader [anonymous Gort] swaps the guts of two hard drives to bring one back from the land of the dead.

Someone at work had a laptop computer they never backed up. They traveled 1000 miles to give a presentation, using the laptop

[Nick] built this laptop cooler to bring down the temperature of his processor. As a fellow Dell owner I know how hot these things can get. His simple stand plus fan dropped the temperature from 105degF to 89degF. No need to buy something that you can build yourself.

Continue reading “Laptop Cooler” →

Follow along as reader [Seth] combines two i1400 Thinkpads. He refreshes the batteries, fixes the keyboard and trackpad, removes the floppy, adds USB ports and WiFi to end up with a ghoulish, but functional machine: The Franken-laptop!

I have been known to keep old hardware alive, long past it’s use-by date. Over the last year I acquired a couple of laptops. One of them had been smashed up (I think someone sat on it..) and the other got a drink spilled in to the keyboard. So I ended up with enough parts to make a cheap laptop.

Continue reading “HOW-TO: Laptop Resurrection And Upgrade” →

i’ve got an old dell laptop that’s having _lots_ of problems, so i’ve been waiting for some real inspiration (inspironation?) to tear the thing apart.

as luck would have it, the other day i got a message from asbesto, who told me about a wooden laptop that he made:

Here is my laptop: the “legnatile”; I replaced the plastic shell with a wooden one; it took about 4 months of work, and now it’s lighter than the original plastic shell. A unique piece, ultimate frontier of case modding, joint of natural wood and leather, with high technology. Inspired by “Snow Crash” by Neal Stephenson