The goal of this project was to take a cheap laptop that was destined to be thrown away and turn it into a useable and fun machine for paranormal investigations. When I was at work one day, someone suggested that I visit a local electronics surplus and recycling center. I checked it out online and it showed that they had old desktops and laptops for sale. We originally intended to purchase a laptop online from a website like eBay. But, we decided to go this route because it seemed more fun to go somewhere local and see what kind of a machine we could find. The laptop we ended up purchasing was a Toshiba Satellite C850D (PSC9SC-01K00W) for less than $10. Why was the price so low? Well, it wasn't because the laptop didn't work, it's just that they didn't test to see if it did. We didn't even know if the laptop would turn on and successfully POST before we purchased it. # Specs The processor in this machine is an AMD E1-1200, which was released on June 6th, 2012. It's 64-bit, has two cores, two threads, and integrated Radeon HD 7310 graphics. The bottom of the laptop has a removable cover for easy access to the RAM and the hard drive. The laptop didn't come with its original hard drive for obvious reasons. It did come with a single DIMM that provided 4GB of DDR3 memory. It says in the product specification that it can be expanded to 8GB. It has several options for I/O, including a disc drive, an SD card reader, USB ports, HDMI output, and audio input/output. The display is a 1366x768 LCD. # Original Condition ## The Keyboard The keys were incredibly dirty. I should've taken a photo of the keys before we cleaned them, but you could visibly see green gunk on all of them. The green gunk had found its way into the grooves of the plastic around the keyboard as well. It genuinely may not have been cleaned since it was first purchased 13 years ago. We were able to wipe most of the grime off with some rubbing alcohol. Once we actually felt comfortable touching the keys, however, we realized that some of them were not functioning. Surprisingly, the laptop battery was still working and could hold a charge. # Picking the Operating System ...