$50 Laptops

Since I have some knowledge regarding computers, people keep giving me their somewhat broken or old spare notebooks, so I can have a crack a repairing them. They end up just sitting on the corner of my room gathering dust, mostly due to lack of time, but also of a fear from touching them. Something about attempting repairs at a hardware level, on anything beyond the cursory, just seems daunting to me.

I always had this desire to deeply understand the computer at the most fundamental, physical level, to be able to repair or manipulate them to my heart's desire. To be able to open one up and understand what I'm looking at just by, well, looking at it.

Maybe is the apparent complexity of it all (which I'm sure translates itself to real complexity), but something about it practically begs for me to understand it, but life gets in the way.

I suppose I should attempt to dedicate some time to learning the basics and trying (read: failing) to repair a few. Then maybe I could do something like these good folks.