Watch out for the Hall effect sensor (Score 1)

I did a very similar project. I hacked a laptop so I could fold it around back to back with the screen facing outward and the keyboard facing the wall and put it all into a frame. It has a wireless pcmcia card to control it remotely (changing the slide show). I use "anyplace control" for this, a cheaper alternative to PC Anywhere. The only wire is run through a small hole in the wall concealed behind the "picture" which exits at the baseboard and leads to the power supply hidden behind some furniture. The operating system was Windows 98 which was already on the Laptop. It did not have enough drive space for much else and the OS was already installed. I was almost defeated by the hall effect switch that makes the laprop shut down when the screen is folded down to close it. I had always assumed, without thinking about it that the laptop shut down when closed because of a phyiscal contact. Actually there is a hall effect switch that senses the magnetic field orientation of the screen. This swich on my old laprop (A Dell) also shut it down when the two halves were separated and put back to back. I could not think of any way to disable the switch, even if I could locate it among all the anonymous components soldered to the motherboard. However a piece of light guage sheet steel inserted between the two halves of the laptop effectively shielded it and stopped the laptop from shutting down. The project had the advantage of being relatively cheap but the poor angle view is a drawback. I am planning a replacement using a flat screen monitor and some mini components (motherboard, power supply and hard drive velcroed to the back of the screen.) I would also use Linux which will make it easier to control the thing remotely using telnet and FTP.