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?

Comments

ASUS laptops

[Global-Lightning]

Your best bet will be the ASUS 8400 series of laptops. Most laptops are custom designs that try to squeeze as much into the limited space as possible. In doing so they sacrifice the modularity that makes upgrading desktop PCs so easy.
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.

The problem is...

[cmowire]

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.