top ten things to do with an old laptop

  1. Keep using it if it's still working, dumbass!

  2. Maybe it's not stylish or the latest thing anymore, but unless you need a larger screen to videoconference with your dying grandmother, just keep it. In terms of existing benignly as a biomass on the surface of the planet from whence you came, this is your best option*. Plus, you know, the three R's go in that order for a reason.

  3. Make it a present for somebody who could use it.

  4. In addition to your niece in college or your neighbor's fifth-grader son who needs to practice for keyboarding class, people who tinker always need material. Old computer parts can be reused.

  5. Recycle it.

  6. Recycling isn't always your best option, because your poor little laptop might end up smuggled into a country with low environmental standards (no, I don't mean the U.S. ... at least as far as I know) for "dirty recycling," which is like taking all the hormonal imbalances and cancer pronenesses you're giving yourself by spending all day glommed onto the damn thing's screen and regifting it unkindly to all the marine life & little children of tomorrow. If you choose to recycle, there's a good article in the archives of salon.com here - just click through, yes I believe in you - about how to make sure this doesn't happen.

  7. Make it into a work of art.

  8. To me, this is only slightly less good than recycling, at least if you can make something brilliant. Maybe smash the screen with a hammer and sculpt a blue hand reaching out. Switch all the keys; spell out the quick fox jumps over the lazy dog. Attach appropriately-sized paper to it by the top of the keyboard so that it becomes a book!

  9. Use it as a plate.

  10. food food food

  11. Sit on it.

  12. May either be a tiny chair if not functional, or, if it still works enough to produce heat, a little ass-warmer to supplement a chair of normal size.

  13. DIY skateboard! Just attach wheels!

  14. In fact, you can make two! Do LCD screens smash?

  15. Pretend it works and sell it to a trusting innocent.


  16. Use it as a discus,

  17. albeit a fairly nonstandard one. You can practice throwing it over your house!

  18. Wear it as a hat and tell everyone you're a performance artist.

Many more than ten marvelous suggestions by Apollyon:

  • Grow cress.
  • Attach keys to face to make fancy dress outfit.
  • Put magnets on the keys to make fridge decorations.
  • Put a screen saver of fire on it; burn it; videotape the result. Send it into youtube to make millions.
  • Take out the fan for use on hot days
  • Use it as a keyboard lift for your new laptop.
  • Glue the screen to the wall outside apartment to make people think that you have a very high-tech security system.
  • Wave it around in front of your face making the bzzzumgk sounds to persuade people that you have uploaded the Jedi lightsaber program. ((but in reality you haven't and are just an idiot))
  • Clay pigeon shooting.
  • Very small aerobics step.
  • Sledge.
  • Clothes drier for underpants only (close lid for steam press).
  • Use the wire lead to practice meteor hammer or poi (???) to impress your friends at raves and/or martial arts events.
  • Use as a lure for criminals so that you can catch opportunistic thieves in the act in some sort of vigilante action.
  • Pretend that it is a mobile phone and you are from the 80's.
  • Collect a few and make windchimes. Geeky windchimes.
  • Use it as a frame for an oil painting - preferably of the Windows background.
  • Write a node on your experiences with old laptops.
* - aside from simply not buying one in the first place, but you wouldn't very well be reading this if you hadn't already gone and done that.
DISCLAIMER only take suggestions one through four seriously, sillyface.Please try some of Apollyon's solutions. I'd especially like to see the geeky windchimes.
DTal makes a good point. So does rootbeer277.

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