Howdy DIYers,

I happened across a lovely dell inspirion 8500. They just don't design laptops like this anymore.

Now, it's very old. It has RAM in the megabytes, so not really usable these days. I'm wondering if anybody has put a new motherboard or somehow upgraded this or a similar laptop to be decent but still keep the shell.

It is very doable - for someone with the right knowledge and experience.

You'll need to create adapters or interfaces for all the peripherals you're keeping - keyboard, touchpad, screen, etc.

You may need to create one or more custom PCBs. You may need a heat station to transplant chips to those custom PCBs.

Owning a 3D printer will help, because you will need physical adapters for many of the new components.

So, yes! It can be done, and it has been done with similar computers. But it is not easy, and it is not for the faint of heart.

Can you? Yes. Is it worth your time and effort? Probably not. But that's rarely stopped anyone.

I do have access to a shitty 3d printer. Curious if you know of any resources to make a custom PCB.

You can upgrade the CPU (yes it is socketed), ram, and slap an ssd in there. Install Windows 2000 or xp or Linux. It looks like it's a socket 478 which you could go with a 2.6 ghz pentium 4 and possibly 2gb of ram. It's ide hard drive though so an ssd might be out of the question. Edit:
https://ebay.io/m/AfEWRW

Do this + one of the ultralight Linux distros like puppy or similar and it'd fucking rip

I don't know much about making them, no.

I'm always fascinated by people who choose to do this, but I've never actually felt like trying anything like that, myself.

I do my own share of "because I can" projects, but none have to do with those kinds of electronics.

I've only seen it done on youtube but pretty sure there's specific software to design it and companies that can make it for you.

Nobody makes their own PCBs at home anymore. You likely order them from JLCPCB or pcbway. Look up KiCAD on how to design them.

People are doing this for old IBM Thinkpads and slapping new Intel core i9 CPUs in those

So physically something small like a lattepanda or raspberry pi would happily fit in there. You could also fit a decent battery inside.

The problems you would need to solve are connecting the touchpad, keyboard and screen to it. Even more fun as that is going to be an old screen.

Depends on how much of the shell you want to keep. Some Bluetooth keyboards would probably fit in the same footprint if you are happy to just cut out the current keyboard and most likely make some kind of border to fit around where the dimensions differ. If you are OK with that then you can probably do similar with the screen.

Although a new screen alone will cost more than this is worth.

At least until you encounter the modern web. My 2012 medium to high end gaming laptop sometimes struggles with all the bloat...