Another form of recycling

I was in my office today having a chat with another IT guy that works next door to me. We were talking about our usual catch up stories of people calling with stupid issues that you hear about and think "surely, that's a joke". Then he noticed my Acer Aspire One netbook and asked how I got it working?

Well, this netbook has a bit of a story. The netbook was brought in by a client of mine who came home one day to find his children playing with the Aspire One..... when I say playing.... I mean they were jumping on it. By doing so they cracked the screen. I quoted him the cost of a brand new screen and while diagnosing other issues, I discovered the battery was not being detected at all.

With my labour fee added to the job it came in pretty close to just going out and buying a new netbook. Ths is exactly what the customer ended up doing. When I asked him what of this broken Aspire, he said "Chuck it". Like hell.

I wiped the operating system off the hard drive, installed Crunchbang Linux and used the laptop as a small desktop PC, connected to an external monitor and the charger for life.

I played around with it for a few months, eventually taking advantage of the built-in webcam by installing motion, a Linux project that turns webcams into surveillance cameras, and the PC they're connected to, a hard drive recorder.... all the while still keeping the functionality of a regular Linux based PC. The webcam was always on and could be viewed remotely via the web (I had also installed Apache). But it only recorded when it detected motion at my office between the hours of 6pm and 10am. I drive to work after peak hour. Saves time, money, the environment and my sanity. But one day I came to work early to see if the detection worked. It did, so I was happy.

Then, while travelling through the land of Ebay, I found an LCD screen for the little netbook and thought it might be worth fixing, seeing as all the other hardware worked. I'd hold off on the battery, since it was not as big a deal. A week later the screen arrived, 5 minutes later I had the old screen off and the new one getting put in place. Before fully reassembling the laptop, I tested it out. BOOM! It worked. I put the rest of it together and had a reasonable PC working nearly 100%.

Fast forward another month, and I'm searching Ebay for a battery. I decided that I wanted to replace my old Asus EeePC 701 since it really is a pain in the behind reading websites on the dismally resolved 7 inch LCD. The Acer, while only another 1.9" bigger offers a much higher resolution that makes reading websites easier while not distracting from the actual form factor of the netbook. I like to use the EeePC in bed before heading off to sleep when catching up on blogs, digg.com and threehugger.com

Having this extra screen size and res is much nicer, and as such my EeePC will now be sold to the person who best deserves it.

So, what became of the battery? Well, before I went shopping on Ebay, I did what I usually do... Never waste an opportunity to dissect a piece of hardware I want to know about. I pulled the battery apart to see what was inside. The first thing that stuck out was a loose cable. I got out my soldering iron, fixed the cable back in place and tested out the battery. It charges!!!

What's the moral of all this? Well, this is the story I told my fellow IT mate next door.

Why?

Because I illustrated that this was a form of recycling. The funny thing was, while this person is quite learned, he always thought of recycling as something you put your cans, bottles and cardboard into and off it went.

I told him that's recycling too. Then I rested the Aspire One on my recycled cardboard box cut-out that I turned into a laptop stand. In fact, I've made about 40 cardboard laptop stands just from cardboard I get from suppliers who I order parts and accessories off for my IT business.

I give away each laptop stand with any laptop purchase.

My IT mate looked at me in amazement and commented that I got to all that trouble. Funny, I didn't think of it as trouble at all. I saved a perfectly fine laptop from landfill and I have probably saved a few tens of kilograms in cardboard hitting the landfill too. I do the same at home.

I also do the same with mates. Particularly one of my mates who loves nothing more than finding someone else's junk that they have discarded and giving it a polish and a new lease on life.

Recycling isn't just about cans, cardboard and bottles.