Lenovo AIO to Desktop - Back to Home
For years, I've been battling with this broken old Lenovo all in one, trying to find a use for it. It used to work, but then it fell off a garage shelf & the screen shattered. I've wanted to do something with it for years, but due to Lenovo's awful computer design, it's almost impossible to take apart. But, after the use of a hammer & some screwdrivers as pry bars, I was finally able to get it disassembled. With it finally apart , I decided to convert it in to a standalone desktop PC.
Here's what it looked like before disassembly. Sorry about any blurry photos, my phone's autofocus sucks.
As mentioned before, getting the case open took some destructive effort. The inside of the case wasn't much better; the HDD caddy had a ton of screws holding it down, and one of them got stripped, so I had to just break the HDD caddy out with my hands. In total, I must've taken out at least 30 screws in the process of gutting the computer.
One of the only cool things in this PC was the webcam, which had a really neat pop-out design with a ton of pulleys & gears. Due to the complex moving parts, I have a feeling that lots of these have broken over the years.
After parting out the entire computer, I was left with all I needed: the motherboard, fan, and HDD. The HDD has a strange SATA adapter on it that converts the SATA power to a tiny 4 pin connector.
From there, I made a cardboard box case out of a Pringles tray. I didn't have the power button, so I had to jumpstart the machine with a screwdriver. One really annoying setback I had was that the computer only has HDMI out. This usually wouldn't be an issue, but believe it or not, I didn't have a single monitor I could use that had HDMI. Thus, I waited over a week for Amazon to deliver a 5 dollar HDMI to VGA adapter.
There was only one problem: it wouldn't power on. The fan spins, but there was no video output. It's not the junky HDMI adapter, since it worked on another PC I tried it with. I don't know if the motherboard is just fried, or if there's something else going on stopping it from outputting video.
This project has been going on for multiple months now, and I have a much more important project for later this month, so I don't have the time right now to continue troubleshooting this thing. But, if I ever do get things running, there will be another article detailing my adventures.