I have an old laptop and have seen many hacks about turning them into digital picture frames to show slideshows and what not, but my question is, would it be possible to use the LCD and the CD drive and anything else to make a portable DVD player? I'd like to use the motherboard somehow instead of going to buy extra harware. The Laptop works fine and everything but I wanted to eliminate the use of the Hard drive to make it silent. Any help?
You need the operating system for the motherboard to function, otherwise, not having a hard drive will not work. Possibilities are waiting for flash based hard drives to come out, but they're ridiculously expensive and might not adapt to your laptop.
You would also need a DVD drive, CD drives use a completely different optical pickup system.
Overall, unless you're a rockstar engineer with a bachelor's degree in EE, it's not going to happen.