I tend to put laptops in this category.

Like any good nerd I spent countless hours trying to figure a way to remove and use the screen on one of the broken laptops piled up in my closet. There's no good reason for that level of waste.

You could put them on Craigslist or Ebay. I've bought two LCDs that way in order to repair other laptops of the same model with broken screens.

any success on that project?

Nobody has ever really had success with that sort of project, though I've been reading about people trying for the last 10 years or so.

Earth LCD is your best resource for LCD hackery. They have a controller kit that will drive certain LCD panels. It's $200 and will drive a panel at a rez up to 1024x768 http://store.earthlcd.com/NK-GM2221-421-LCD-Controller-KIt?s...

By contrast, I just bought a brand new 32" TV at Best Buy for a demo monitor. It was $450 and does 1920x1080.

Laptop LCDs use a variety of different interfaces, so it's hard to make a generic kit. By the time you do, the volume demand for such a kit is so low, you end up with having to price it in the $200-$300 dollar range to make your R&D and manufacturing costs back. For about the same money you can get an LCD monitor of similar size/resolution to the laptop display in an easy ready-to-use package.

brk sums it up. It's one reason I don't like laptops in general. Tossing those perfectly usable screens attached to a faulty motherboard is pretty distasteful.

For me it's always been the screen that died first...