I TURNED A TOY LAPTOP INTO A GAMING LAPTOP!

My nephew's laptop. Well, laptop might be a little too much credit. Wait, is that an Apple logo? Oh my god. An Apple. Just not Apple. This thing has exactly one job. Flip the power switch, play a few children's songs, loop the same cute animal animation over and over until the batteries die. Even the keyboard, mouse buttons and touchpad are completely fake. They're only there to make it look like a real laptop. So today, I'm going to do something it was never designed to do. I'm turning this toy laptop into a real gaming laptop. Let's get started. First, let's take a closer look at the laptop itself. I'm not admiring the design or anything like that. I just need to figure out whether it's physically possible to fit new hardware inside. The first thing that caught my attention was the thickness. At around 3.5 cm, it's surprisingly chunky. But that's not really the problem. The problem is how tiny. I searched through my entire collection of spare parts, but I couldn't find a single motherboard that would actually fit inside this chassis. And it's not just the motherboard. The display is incredibly small too. Only about 13 cm wide. That makes this project much harder than I expected, because finding a screen that small isn't easy at all. Just when I was running out of ideas for what hardware could possibly fit inside this toy laptop, I stumbled across something pretty interesting. A miniature Android desktop computer. These little machines are typically used as information kiosks or digital advertising displays. I picked this one up as a surplus from a convenience store. Now let's see if it works. Look at that! The Android logo. So this little computer is still alive. Unfortunately, it's pretty old. It's running Android 6, which definitely shows its age. Even so, it's packed with some surprisingly clever hardware. It has a smooth 7-inch touchscreen along with a decent selection of ports, including mini HDMI and even a gigabit Ethernet. Not bad for something that was never meant to be a consumer PC. As for the performance, we'll save that for later. Because now comes what might be the hardest part of this entire project. I'm somehow going to fit this entire Android mini PC inside a toy laptop. So the first step is taking the toy laptop apart. Getting inside the toy laptop was actually pretty easy. All I had to do was remove the four screws on the bottom. Once I opened it, I couldn't help but laugh. The inside was as simple as it gets. There were only two tiny circuit boards and a single speaker, which makes perfect sense when you remember what this thing was originally designed to do. So the first job was obvious. Everything inside had to go. Every wire, every unnecessary part. Next, I removed the display assembly. Wait, what is this? Instead of a real screen, there's just a printed picture being moved by a tiny 1-watt motor. Almost like a miniature conveyor belt. Clever little toy, but that's about it. I'm not going to spend much time talking about every bit of this space, because it's going to be replaced with something far more interesting. Thankfully, there aren't many parts inside, so stripping the toy down only took a few minutes. Now it's time to take apart the Android mini PC. We're working with this small green board. This is the heart of the entire system. It combines the CPU, RAM, and storage onto a single compact motherboard. For a project like this, that's almost perfect. Tiny, efficient, and incredibly easy to work with. So I disconnected all the cables and lifted the motherboard out of its original case. Next came the display. Fortunately, it was only held in place with adhesive strips, so removing it was surprisingly easy. Now comes the fun part. Figuring out how to fit everything inside the toy laptop. The display cable is extremely short, so the motherboard has to sit directly behind the screen. Then, I'll add four lithium battery cells to power the entire system. After moving everything around for a while, this is the layout I finally settled on. The first step is mounting the new display into the toy laptop. To make it fit, I need to remove a few unnecessary plastic pieces and trim away several support tabs, so the panel can sit perfectly flush with the top half of the case. Since the replacement display is slightly larger than the original opening, I also have to cut away the plastic bezel that's blocking the screen. Once that's done, the display drops right into place. Honestly, the fit is better than I expected. To secure it, I'm using hot glue on all four corners. It's simple, but it's more than strong enough for a project like this with the display locked in place. It's time to figure out where the motherboard will go. Unfortunately, the original plastic standoffs get in the way, so they have to be cut out as well. While I'm at it, I'll cut a small opening along the top edge so I can still access the external ports. I'll fast forward through this part. About 15 minutes later, everything is finally trimmed to size. Originally, I planned to mount the motherboard using 5-millimeter standoffs, but the mounting holes are much smaller than I expected. So instead, I'm using smaller screws.