Salvaging my old laptop

I am really excited about this blog post. This is something that I wanted to do a long time ago. The first thing I ever "made" was my college computer. I loved that machine :) Currently, I posses an old i3 laptop, Acer Aspire 4740, which has no hard disk and its battery is dead. I recently saw this video on Youtube and it seemed like a brilliant design. I want to use this as the basis of my "desktop" computer.

I plan to use the new desktop to design stuff things on openscad, slice 3d models and program embedded systems etc. I will try to go a bit over the top on this, as I have waited a long time to mod a laptop. I envision a standalone processing unit, hanging from the sides of my shelf. I see a monitor, made from the screen of my old laptop with 6 dof. I see that I can connect 3 HDMI inputs to this monitor, so I can use the monitor with say 2 Raspberry Pis and the computer simultaneously. I see something awesome. Lets now see how much I can actually make and get to work.

First thing is to open the laptop and see what I am dealing with. I used the official Acer 4740 repair/maintenance guide. This is what I found on the laptop:

1. The hard disk tray. 
2. 6 gigs of ram. Should make for a decent workbench computer.
3. The wifi module. The interesting thing about this card is that it is a mini PCIe card. This means I have options to expand in the future.
4. The DVD drive. I will not use this in the build. I plan to scavenge the laser and the motors from it.
5. Stereo speakers.
6. Keyboard and touch-pad.
7. 14 inch LP140WH2 1366x768 16:9 LCD panel. This will be the heart of my monitor, how I will need to figure out.
8. Metal LCD holders. Will be reused when I am designing the monitor.
9. A microphone.
10. A 1.3MP camera.
11. USB A female connector with ribbon cable.
12. The Bluetooth module. 
13. A modem....Yeah a fixed telephone line modem.....donno what to do with this
14. The all important motherboard. This will be the heart of the processing unit. It has a i3-330M processor, which has 2 cores, 4 threads running at 2.15 GHz. 
15. A six button "hotkey" used on the laptop for tasks like switching the wifi, bluetooth one/off etc. I am excited about this. If I am able to write a driver for this, then I will be able to interface the computer with the outside world.

The LCD and its metal hinge

The motherboard with the i3 chip and heatsink

1.3MP Camera

I am trying to source aluminium sheets, to be the base of my "new" computer much like the video below. But I am unable to do so because usually the dealers are not ready to deal in small volumes. I am also looking at alternative build materials.