(OPTIONAL BACKSTORY)
So, near the end of last school year, I realized that we had two few computers in the house. I had been running all of my projects off of my mom's laptop which worked fine for me, but when school came around again I had a brother starting High school, which would increase his workload to the point where we would need separate computers. I decided i would need to invest in a computer, but being the poor teenager that I am, I didnt have much money. I needed a cheap computer, but I wouldnt accept a Chromebook or something like that (Chromebooks are good for their purpose of running chrome, but not much more than that). Let me just say I got lucky with what I found.
I got a friend to take me to the scrapyard he worked at. It was an off day so no one was around, and my friend was pretty high up in the yard. I had come purely for the purpose of looking at the old motherboards and crusty computer components that they had huge tubs of in a storage room, with no intents of looking for a computer. He let me look around for a while, and in one of the tubs, I noticed 200+ old laptops, many heavily used and some broken, but laptops never the less. I picked a few up and sorted through them. Soon, I found a pair of Dell Latitude e5530's that looked in pretty good condition. Minor wear and no visible damages. I asked my friend If I could take them home, and he said I could have them for no charge. Again, I was lucky.
(END OF BACKSTORY)
Basically, I got a pair of used and scraped dell laptops for free.

We had a dell charger at home, so I started by plugging the laptops both in. The first one yielded no results. It didnt turn on, no LED's were activated, and I didn't see any visible or audible difference. I put it aside, and plugged in the second one. The power LED's lit up, and after a few minutes, I saw a beautiful DELL logo spell out across the screen. I dont remember the exact output of the screen after that, but basically it said there was no boot device. a.k.a., whoever had scrapped these laptops had taken the 500GB HDD's that came with the laptops. Oh well.

I opened both laptops up, and removed the ram (4gb, one stick) from the broken one, as well as the CPU fan, keyboard, processor, CD/DVD drive, LCD, and the SD+EC card placeholders/dustblockers. Yes, I fully dismantled the broken laptop and trashed the rest of the unneeded parts. I opened up the working laptop, popped in the extra RAM stick, and set it aside until a week later, when I purchased a $90 1TB SSHD (Hybrid Drive) from amazon, as well as a $10 Ubuntu 16.04 LTS disk (yes, I could have made my own bootable flash drive for free, but I wanted the disk anyway for other reasons).

I inserted the hard drive and closed the laptop back up after a bit of cleaning. I powered it on, and inserted the disk. after rebooting it, I hit F12 and told it to boot to the CD. I installed Ubuntu 16.04 64 bit on the hard drive, and that was that.

For $90 or $100 dollars, I got a fully functioning Dell Laptop with 8GB of ram, a 1TB SSHD, an i7 Quad Core(3.2 Ghz*2, 2.7 Ghz*2) processor (this is odd because when I researched the laptop online it said it shipped with an i5, but I guess whoever previously owned this bought it especially).

I am just keeping the other parts from the other laptop as spares, or external components. I plan on buying a SATA to usb cable for the CD/DVD drive to make an external CD reader, and a few other small projects. Yes, the keyboard was also the origins of the keyboard ribbon cable adapter thread.

I only waited so long to post about this because I forgot.

Anway, I have had no problems on this laptop after 3-4 months of use, albeit the issues that Ubuntu present. I do hope to get windows on this eventually, but at $130, it isn't really worth it for me yet. If anyone has some windows copies lying around and is willing to give them away, contact me

BTW dont ask me to make you a computer

Hey, this is pretty neat.

So what are you going to do with the rest of the parts you gutted from the poor laptop?

You're very lucky. My parents do not want me anywhere near a scrap yard, but perhaps once I get a driver's license (in about a month or so) I will be able to drive myself to one and get some computer parts I desperately need.

Dell laptops in particular (or maybe in even greater particularity, Dell Latitudes) are very common to find in all kinds of states: broken hard drives, broken LCDs, broken keyboards... and there are a lot of people who toss entire laptops simply because the hard drive died.

But I did not know that Latitudes could come with quad-core i7s. Also surprised you got an SSHD for less than $100 (in my opinion, they seem to be just regular hard drives with the addition of big caches typically found in enterprise-grade hard drives).

You can use Windows 10 without license legally, I have a 40€ computer with Core 2 duo 1.5GB RAM and 250GB HDD, repaired by me (black screen), and I use windows 10 legally without license.

You only have to download the iso from Microsoft and in the installation say that you not have the license.

You can't custom the start menu or the task bar, but is fully functional.

P.D.: Your laptop is great

But then you have Windows 10.

Also, TIL just how low the minimum requirements are for W10

Yes, I've looked at that, but I'd rather have a fully customizable Ubuntu then a limited Windows. Although, I may try to put windows on a USB drive for the I really need it.