Can I use raspberry to use the working parts of a broken laptop?

Alas, the chances are slim that this is going to work.

The screen is probably "LVDS". the 'pi does not have LVDS. :-( There are HDMI to LVDS boards available, but in general I'm not sure if you're going to find one of those boards with exactly the fitting flatcable connector. The screen also requires "exotic" voltages to power the backlight. You'll have to leave part of the laptop intact for that.

The keyboard is usually connected to the laptop as an oldfashioned "PC" keyboard. Mine says:

   ... AT Translated keyboard ... i8042....

in the logs. That means it gets raw keypresses from an intel 8042 embedded keyboardcontroller, or something that emulates this. On the raspberry pi, you're expected to use an USB keyboard. Again, conversion might be possible, but difficult in practice.

And the harddrive: it probably uses SATA to connect to the laptop. The RPI doesn't have SATA. So again, you'll be buying conversion stuff.

I'd say your options are:

* RPI, buy screen, keyboard, mouse. Or, to save on buying the screen: connect the pi to the existing TV that has HDMI?

* Get her a $100 tablet.

Hey Roger,

Everything in the laptop is intact....the only thing is that I need to find a way to by pass the broken graphic card. I am relatively new to this...so, I am not sure how to do that.

I thought it was easier to do: simply just connecting the the raspberry board to the laptop and running everything from there....making it use the laptop's keyboard and screen. But probably it is easier said than done.

The cheap laptop would be an option. I might consider that. The HDMI TV is not an option....she has an old TV. She is 62.

Hey Roger,

Everything in the laptop is intact....the only thing is that I need to find a way to by pass the broken graphic card. I am relatively new to this...so, I am not sure how to do that.

I thought it was easier to do: simply just connecting the the raspberry board to the laptop and running everything from there....making it use the laptop's keyboard and screen. But probably it is easier said than done.

The cheap laptop would be an option. I might consider that. The HDMI TV is not an option....she has an old TV. She is 62.

Yeah. I asked my mother if her TV would have HDMI to allow us to connect our Raspberry pi when we visited.... Her answer: "What's HDMI? The TV is from '92". That predates HDMI by about a decade..... No it doesn't have HDMI.

Components for desktop PCs use "standard" interfaces and standard connectors. But there is some "duplication". For example, in the days of VGA screens, the computer would do an digital to analog conversion for the screen, and the flatscreen would then do an analog to digital conversion to get back to digital signals. In a laptop you'd cut out all the middle stuff and keep things digital.

Although things remain digital in these days with HDMI, for transport on the cable-to-the-monitor, the signal is serialized on the HDMI cable, and then deserialized again in the monitor. Again the laptop cuts the middleman and skips the serialize/deserialize.

This leaves  you with a "working parallel screen" from the laptop, and a "serialized display signal" on the 'pi.

I guess I could just get a normal cable to connect the raspberry pi to the TV and a keyboard and mouse. Not a major investment. Plus a USB camera.

Then the internet could be used via the ethernet cable...wondering if that would be enough for browsing and skype though.

If you get a "pi2" you have a "respectable" machine. If you don't go overboard with too many apps, then it suffices for basic browsing. If she has a WIFI router, you could for an additional $5 get a WIFI usb adapter, and use that to skip the ethernet cable.

In my experience however, ethernet is more reliable than wifi. Consider the "support calls" if WIFI needs to be restarted somehow.