On Sunday I took the shelves down from above the fireplace. I removed the fish tank about 6 weeks ago and the large gap has remained unfilled. I decided to rotate the shelves 180 degrees to move the hole up to the top left corner. It's not so bad up there because it's higher and you can't see through the shelves to the mess of wires behind. I'll fill it with big books or a plant or something like that.
The trick to this rotation was that I had to remove and rotate the LCD. That worked fine but I couldn't get the laptop to display on the LCD. I figured a reboot would solve it. Wrong. The laptop shut off and then refused to turn back on. I think the hard drive is dead but I'm not going to spend time fixing a free junk laptop. I quickly found a replacement on expo.live.com and picked it up on Tuesday. The new laptop got installed last night and everything is back to normal.
The laptop is a P2 400 with 128MB of RAM, a 12GB hard drive and a DVD drive. My first computer in 1998 was a P2 350 with 128MB of RAM, a 10GB hard drive and a CD drive and it cost me $2400. This laptop cost me $40.