My company threw away some very old laptops one day. So I took one home to open it up and see what I could do. I learned a little of laptop layout, I made some soldering training, I got yet another wall wart... Then it came to me, it would be great if I could have a third screen on my desk.

 

But laptop screens aren't like normal monitors and can't be just plugged through HDMI or some other cable, they're internally connected to the motherboard. But after some investigation, I learned that most they can indeed be reused as monitors through adapters and universal inverters.

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First I tried to go for a universal one, which is incredibly cheap, but even though I specified the model of my laptop I got a false LVDS cable layout and even after rewiring it all it still didn't work.

So I went for one specific for these series of screens, and it did actually work! So then I had to come up with some kind of enclosure to hold it all in place.

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Since I didn't have much space left on my desk, I decided to go for an adjustable, moving frame. I bought one of those classic big adjustable lamps with an arm. I removed the lamp and reused the wire soldering it together to a 12V wall plug. Then I reused the old laptop enclosure to protect the fragile screen. I tried different objects to hold the screen tight on the lamp arm until I got good results with a small metal rack.

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It did indeed work. This adapter had only one VGA output, but I had a spare VGA-HDMI adapter and it did the trick. The quality wasn't the best (probably due to the adapter) but it made quite an interesting, cyberpunkish adjustable monitor, which could be easily turned vertical to read text, or horizontal for normal use.

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Unfortunately for me, my laptop has only one HDMI output, which was already in use. I tried firstly a HDMI splitter, which did indeed split the image, but the same one to all monitors. I even tried the ones who specifically said "extend images", to no avail. Lastly, I tried an "HDMI to USB adapter", which do indeed work on USB3.0, but the results were quite poor (very low-quality image, low refresh rate, and worst of all, constant flicker).

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Still, for desk computers it is still a fun and cheap way to get extra monitors, and totally worth considering if you are going to throw away an old laptop.