The screen on my wife’s Lenovo s10e gave up the ghost last week. I thought it might be just a loose connector and that I could fix it, and an initial attempt at strip down and rebuild seemed to work. Sadly my fix didn’t hold.

I’ve been using my own s10e mostly to play videos on a bedroom TV[1], so I switched over the hard drives. This got my wife working again, and also gave me the opportunity for a project that I’ve had in mind for some time (in anticipation of this eventuality).

With the broken screen removed from the netbook I mounted it, its power supply and the TV power supply onto the back of the TV with velco pads:

This got the netbook and tangle of wires out of the way, but left the challenge of how to control it. I dealt with that by getting a Kogan Wireless Keyboard and Trackpad. It’s about the size of a regular TV remote, but is surprisingly easy to use.

So now I have a very tidy setup that I can control from bed.

Notes:

[1] Sadly the bedroom TV I bought a little while ago didn’t come with HDMI, so I can’t just use a Raspberry Pi with OpenELEC.