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Home-Built Laptops?
dpro writes "Just looking around on the web didn't reveal too much, so I thought I'd
ask you people if any of you have experience building your own laptop
computers. I see that it's not going to be cheaper but all the stuff that's out there either lacks features, has features I don't need or
there's simply no open source driver for some of them (and the companies
aren't exactly helpful in writing one yourself).
So what do you people think? Can anyone point me in the right direction?"
My motto is
"Can't someone else do it?", but the idea appeals to me; is the market for laptop hardware sufficiently commoditized? Or do you have to build your own case with a rasp and file?
I can't see why they couldn't have come up with a standard for memory or even use the same standard as the desktop. I have an old laptop that uses a standard 72pin SIMM, so it's been done (the same laptop though has it's hard drive wired directly to the motherboard). I don't understand why it's not more widespread. I would think this would help the manufacturers bring their costs down.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
SO-DIMM is the standard many laptops currently use for memory. The only factor is how tall they are, as the standard has 4 sizes, and some sizes may not fit in your particular laptop. But the standard has been out for a while, and odds are, the shiny new laptops at the store that you have your eye on use it.
:-)
Hell, even the Mac laptops use it, so they did a decent job on the standard
Oh, just like PC DIMMs, you have PC66, and PC100 memory. I had to worry about that when I bought my extra memory for my Solo 9300, as it uses a 100 mHz bus (unherd of at the time when I got it new in Aug 99).
If you were half the man your father, err... your much older brother was you wouldn't need to customize a laptop - you would fit an LCD into an ATX case and customize to your hearts content.
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--Hey Doctor Jones! No time for love!
Making a laptop probably isn't doable if you are hoping to snap parts together.
However, if you wanted to really do it youself, you should be able to make a fairly nice r3k or other simple machine for yourself that would have memory, harddrive controller, and the chips to drive an LCD display on one board. Then, you can probably get the rest of the parts from surplus dealers and make the casing yourself.
Thing is that there don't seem to be any reference designs for any decent platforms other than the G3, and G3 chips are just too complex to work with. What's needed is a chip with limited pin count so that you can get away with useing a simple circuit printing kit and soldering the sockets on by hand (you don't want to solder the chips on so that you can reuse them if the board is foobar'ed).
I'm a loser baby, so why don't you kill me.
The 8400 is a highly modular design that lets you swap the CPU, memory, modem/LAN, hard-drive, touchpad, display, DVD/CD-ROM, and even the motherboard. You'll need the same tools used for working on a desktop and a little more skill due to some of the smaller components.
Tom's Hardware recently did a write-up on this portable with many examples of customizing it.
Some of he parts are available, like laptop-sized CD/DVD drives, for example.
The problem is that laptops are too much trouble to customize, for a number of reasons.
The main one is that, in order to fit all of the pieces in a small case, everything has to fit together like a puzzle. There is no chance of this being standardized any time soon. Every model fits together in a slightly different fashion because the size requirements change.
Next, the parts are rather fragile. Sure laptops are getting pretty durable, but they use tiny ribon cables inside and such things. You really need to know what you are doing if you want to mess with the innards of them.
Finaly, laptops are a different business model than PCs. People don't upgrade laptops and they don't buy cheap ones, which is the main two reasons why you can buy the parts.
I'm a total advocate of the custom PC, but even I purchase off-the-shelf laptops. It's just not even worth bothering with.
Having said that, You might want to check out the related market of embedded computers. All of the PC/104, Single Board, etc. systems that are out there could be modified into a working laptop.
Gentoo Sucks