Acer TM800 LCI Motherboard
 

Hi all,

I have an Acer 800 LCI laptop on which I was running Slackware 9.1 for quite some time. However it seems the Graphics card on the laptop (ATI Radeon 9000M) has been borked (dunno if it is due to my "tweaking while working with Slackware :( ) so now I seem to have been left with a very expensive paperweight because my neighbourhood laptop repair shop has told me that the motherboard has to be replaced.

The cost of replacement suggested to me here in the UK is in the region of 600£. This is WAAAAAY beyond my budget.

So I am turning to the great guys/gals at linuxquestions; Does anyone know whether the laptop (NOT in warranty) motherboard can be obtained in the UK for a cheap rate or even if it can be procured from abroad.

If not can anyone tell me if it would be possible to sell this laptop for around £600?. Its an excellent machine otherwise with 40 GB harddisk, 512 MB RAM a 15" monitor with a DVD Writer/CD Writer and a battery which can give ~ 3hrs under normal use. Everything is in excellent condition with only ONE minor scratch.

Any ideas or suggestions will be greatly appreciated. It may be that this post is not relevant to this site and I apologize in advance if it is so. But I have had many of my issues resolved due to excellent advice at this site and am hoping that event this can be resolved by someone here.

Thanks again for reading.

when you say the video card is borked, do you mean no video, or just no x. my reasoning is, if you get a text screen, you could set it up as a server of some sort. you could use ssh for administration, i'm just trying to think of uses for a box w/no video. hope that gives you some options and ideas. keep in mind that setting it up as a server of some sort would require more uptime, so you'd want to "plug it in" so to speak, rather than use the battery.
good luck.