So now that you have decided to fix your laptop, you need to find the tools and parts to do it.

For this project I used the following tools:

small Philips head screwdriver

32GB USB flash drive

Some tape

an additional computer to make a bootable USB flash drive with

And also the following parts:

broken laptop(T500)

power adapter for broken laptop

two 1GB sticks of 1333Mhz DDR3 RAM

160GB hard drive

optical drive to hard drive adapter

Where to find parts? I usually order used ones off ebay. It is pretty cheap and I have mostly had good luck with it. You can also find parts in other dead laptops sometimes. Often these laptops will have RAM and hard drives that are salvageable.

For power adapters I would recommend sticking with the manufacturers brand name adapters. Another possible option is a generic power adapter that has interchangeable tips. These work with many different brands of laptops. Whichever adapter you go with you want to make sure it has the right voltage and enough wattage for your laptop. I lucked out and found a Lenovo branded 90 watt power adapter at the same thrift store I got the laptop from.

To find out what kind of RAM is compatible with your laptop you should check the specification sheet for the laptop. Used RAM is OK. I ended up getting two used sticks of 1GB RAM at a speed of 1333MHz. 2 Gigabytes is not much RAM by today's standards but should be OK since I'm planning on using Linux for the operating system, and am not going to do anything too crazy with it.

For storage solid state drives(SSD) are preferable to hard drives(HDD). SSDs are faster and much more resistant to damage. They are also more expensive. Another thing to look at is if you laptop still has a hard drive caddy. This is a little bracket or harness your hard drive fits in before getting mounted in the laptop. This T500 is missing it's hard drive caddy and optical drive, which gave me an idea. I had seen optical drive to hard drive adapters online before. They let you use a hard drive in your optical drive slot as long as your optical drive uses a SATA connection. This T500 does have a SATA connection in the optical drive bay, so I used one of these adapters. This way I have a generic hard drive caddy I can use in other laptops.

I could have put 8 Gigabytes of RAM and a SSD in this laptop but that would have increased costs significantly. The laptop would have been MUCH faster with the more expensive parts. You have to find the point of price vs performance you are comfortable with.

