My colleague Roberto has entered his battered, mutated laptop in a contest at Gizmodo. Many entered, but Roberto’s box is now among the four finalists. Go vote for him to help him win a brand new Sharp laptop to replace this piece.

Roberto explains the story behind the spectacle:

“Here are some pics of my Toshiba 3480ct laptop. I have had this laptop since summer 2001; it was given to me as part of a college scholarship. The next winter is when everything went wrong. After a long night of studying with friends at a dorm across campus, I decide to head home. As soon as I make it to my room I put my laptop bag on the floor and jump in bed. Maybe five minutes later I decide to go use bathroom and when I come back I grab up my laptop to surf the net. I open it I see all these weird looking blobs on the screen that look like a pen exploded. I turn on my laptop only to see a huge crack down the middle. I immediately put the laptop back on the floor (great place for it, huh?) and went to sleep hoping that it was just a nightmare. When I woke up the next morning my worst fears were realized. The first thing I did was call up a few repair shops to get some estimates over the phone. I finally found one place that said they had used LCDs and could get me a good price on the repair. At the time the LCD new would have cost me 1100. I finally got an estimate of like $800 so I decided not to get it fixed and just look for a screen and do it myself. After a few months with no luck I eventually gave up decided to create a 3lb ultra portable desktop, and name thee The Ladtop (better than the commodore I had when I was 4 ).”

“As you can see from my extensive collection of peripherals this baby is a workhorse. We have the 100gb external hard drive (where else can I store my movies, music, CD images of every windows), the original battery (which gives this baby a hearty 15-30 minutes of battery life), battery pack (adds up 16x the battery life!), external PCMCIA powered CD drive, and the USB Wifi adapter. Other Optional accessories are this recently purchased 5-inch Xbox LCD, which can be connected, with a VGA to s-video/RCA adapter to provide fully portable experience.”

Specs:
600 mhz p3
192 mb sdram(expandable to 192 mb)
12 gb hard drive
1 usb port
Windows XP Pro

Update: Roberto wins! His victory speech:

I appreciate this more than I can verbally express…I just really wanna thank you guys at gizmodo and sharp for giving me the oppurtunity to tell my story and participate in this great contest. You guys rule!

P.S. I guess those 3 hours a day I spend at work reading you articles finally paid off.