Hey! I'm crazy too!

[restoguy]

I'm thrilled to have all of you on this site to share in my mental condition.  I have an X1050 that I bought, second hand, from a friend and I love it.  I was there when he bought it new and I always wanted it.  After the LCD inverter went out he bought a MAC and sold this one to me.  I have enough money buy a newer laptop, but I like fixing broken junk, it's fun for me.  And I'm glad to have friends like all you who have the same ambitions!

Here's the scoop on my machine.

1.4GHZ--Hope to upgrade to 2.0GHZ eventually
256MB RAM--Upgrading to 1GHZ soon
60G 7200rpm HD--Already upgraded from the 40G 4200rpm, but will probably go to a 100G 7200rpm later
32MB video card--Upgrading to 64MB soon
Stock WiFi(?)--Upgrading to stronger card with better antenna(maybe even external) soon
CDRW/DVD--Upgrading to lightscribe DVDRW if I can make it work
Case, stock for now--Planning to polish the aluminium lid and paint the plastics(Muscle car theme?)

Any suggestions from you guys?  Stuff I missed, or things that work and those that don't?
I look forward to seeing you all around here for a while.

[kf_man]

I would first work on getting the back light working and then move on to other projects.  I'm not really sure where a back light can be found these days, but at worst case, I bet the required component could be had from HP for a reasonable cost.  As for the rest of the machine, the specs should be fine for what most people need.  The one thing I would keep is close eye on is the graphics card.  It's fairly typical in those machines for the graphics card to go bad and replacements are becoming harder and harder to come by.  As for myself, the laptop is almost three years old and still running very strong so it's obviously not a problem for everyone.  I would just make sure that I took it easy with graphics intensive tasks so as not to overwork the GPU and create heat.