I'm writing a test post on a Dell laptop motherboard I just hooked up to see how well it works. My older laptop (a Latitude c600) has a motherboard problem which isn't worth the money it would cost to fix, so I bought a new board on Ebay. Basically, it's the bottom of a laptop, minus the keyboard and everything else, and it looks like this:

The reason they sell them like this is it's not worth the time and trouble to remove the board. Too many little screws (many of which are bears to remove), endless tiny plugs, wires, miniboards and doodads, each of which has to go back in exactly or else nothing will work.

Wanting to be sure this worked before dissecting my laptop, I stuck in the hard drive, the RAM and the mini PCI board, then plugged in a monitor, mouse, and keyboard, and VOILA! It booted right up. No stupid XP activation problems either.

Not that I really needed to write a blog post using it, but I'm trying to determine whether it overheats and whether the charging system cycles properly, and the monitor, keyboard and mouse are disconnected from the other computer, so I'm "on" my new laptop motherboard.

Used this way, it doesn't feel like a laptop at all.

UPDATE: Done. I'm using the laptop now with its new motherboard, and everything works fine.

Taking these things apart is almost as much fun as blogging.