ThinkPad Therapy

See, it's like this........ When I'm frustrated with something, and I can't resolve the problem to my satisfaction, what I do is to fix something. That generally means a computer, or two..... As you guys know, I've been going round and round with Dell over the charge connector on my son's tablet. So far, the results haven't been very good. So over the course of the last few days, I've resorted to self-medicating! No, not like that!

My form of self-medicating started out with a lavender colored IBM ThinkPad X30. About a year and half ago when my then-four-year-old daughter needed a computer. Unlike my son who wasn't really delivered, but "booted-up", she wasn't as electronics oriented as the boy. So I endeavored to make her first computer more "friendly", when experimenting with a rather large and black ThinkPad A21p didn't go very well. So I found her a small "X Series" machine that had enough power to get her on the internet to play some games, and yet be small and unintimidating. Thus was born the "Princess Edition", X30 that I spent the better part of a week painting to get ready for her birthday that year. Well, time has come and gone, as have Patches and Service Packs, which didn't do the old girl any good. So, a few weeks ago, I breathed some life (screen, SSD, RAM) into a derelict X61 and baby girl got an upgrade. This of course left a $3000+, in year-2002-dollars laptop which runs on a PIII-M! If I was in any way normal, it would have found it's way to the garage to sit in a box till eventually it would be disposed of. 

But No.....that's NOT what frustrated, Frugal Propellerheads do! I already had an X31 base (P-M/1.6) sitting in a cabinet, so why not slap together a knock around laptop. However, it was lavender! Can't be seen running around with a lavender laptops, now can we? So, an hour of sanding time later, it was no longer black. I had for some time watched YouTube videos showing guys (some, more successful than other) painting most anything to look like carbon fiber. Here was the perfect excuse to "give it a go" as our British friends would say. The lid already had been none-too-gently sanded; so what you see here are the results.

I sprayed the entire thing silver, taped on the liner, then sprayed on flat black through the rubber mesh. This is what it looked like after the liner was taken off. As you can see, I made a mistake in not stretching the material flat to eliminate the creases.

In this second picture, I had "fogged" the lid with the flat black and the creases aren't nearly as obvious.

After a second fogging, it's much more uniform, and is now awaiting a "satin" clearcoat.

After the clearcoat, it actually looks pretty good, for a really quick-slapped-together job. Over all, I'm pretty happy with it. Particularly since it was for therapy anyway. So people paint, others do wood-working: I work on computers!