I have a Dell Latitude CPxH pIII 500mhz with 256mb ram and a 20gig hdd running Windows XP and Linux. It is getting quite old so I decided some improvements were in order.

First I took the battery (which now holds a charge for about an hour) and discharged it completely. Then I put it in a Ziploc bag in the freezer for a week. After letting it warm up I put it through 3 charge/discharge cycles and I now get a little over 2 hours out of it.

Then I decided it could use a paint job. Dells around this age are made of a horrible orange peal like rough textured plastic. Before I could paint it I had to sand the hell out of it to get it smooth. The lid posed another problem. It had an indent where the dell logo was and 2 ridges running down the lid for style I assume. They were however, preventing me from easily sanding and painting the lid. I grinded down the ridges using a Dremmel. The marks and the indent where the logo was were filled with Bondo and sanded until they were even with the rest of the lid.

Sanding the other pieces was relatively easy and everything else was painted black while the lid was painted blue. When the blue had enough coats on it I printed the pirate logo onto sticker paper and cut it out with an Exacto knife. The sticker was then carefully applied to the blue lid. The lid was then painted with 2 coats of black paint. When the last coat was dry the sticker was removed allowing the blue paint underneath to show through.

Now that the easy part was over I could begin the hard part of making the paint job look professional by giving it a nice mirror gloss finish. I did this by first applying 2 coats of super gloss paint. (all paint used was Krylon Fusion spray paint) This left a nice finish that was glossy. When you paint something with spray paint it is impossible for the paint to go on evenly. It always leaves a tiny orange peal texture in the paint that keeps it from being mirror like this is where the finishing techniques come in.

First everything was sanded with 1000 grit sand paper, then 2000 grit sand paper was used to remove the scratches the 1000 grit left. This leaves the surface super smooth yet ashy and dull. 3m scratch remover is then used to buff the scratches out leaving the surface fairly glossy. Finally Nu Finish car polish was used to make it shiny and protected.

Click below to see pictures of the laptop