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Building a Custom Laptop to Your Specifications?
swordsaintzero asks: "I am not happy with the options presented to me in the laptop market. The system that comes closest, Alienware, costs more than my last car, and still doesn't have exactly what I need! Even Google didn't seem to come across any sites detailing anyone who had built a laptop from scratch. Does someone out there know of such a site? If not, does anyone know the motherboard brand being used in the Alienware Exteme series? If I can get some decent leads, I will post the ensuing mayhem, as I attempt to build my own."
Every computer I've ever owned cost more to purchase than my current car. What's your point?
Custom laptops? Can't help there.
It should be noted, however, that Alienware actually buys their laptops from a company called Clevo, paints 'em green, and resells them for $600 more. You can buy identical laptops for much cheaper from other Clevo resellers, like Sager. Check pctorque.com and powernotebooks.com for "Alienware" laptops without the expensive paint. Of course, they're still ridiculously expensive.
Scratched Emulsion
...are a compromise from the start. These highly integrated and mini-sized parts are not off the shelf components. You just can't get the level of customization that you can on a desktop. Someday you might, but not today.
I'd say make the best educated decision you can about the system you choose--you can't ask for more then that.
Just bought an IBM Thinkpad X31--no idea what the mobo or options card brands are, but it sure works just fine. And the media slice is cool--can go laptop with it on or ultra-portable without it.
-m
http://www.invisik.com
what exactly are your needs?
- What you're looking to spend
- What features are must-haves
- Whether your laptop will also dock and be your primary home PC
- Do you need wireless connectivity?
- Will you be doing mostly office-type work, development, or games?
There are a lot of variables here.Once we have this information, we can then tell you to go do your own fucking research because this is not a help desk.
There are no karma whores, only moderation johns
alienware sales sager notebooks at a 90% markup. A lot of other peolpe sell them. powernotebooks for example . Just google them.
Oh really?
So what are his specifications?
I think the Alienware laptops are mostly built by Clevo (story here, brochure or press release here). I had someone come in with a Clevo quote recently. They look like capable machines.
Intel Pentium(R) M, 1.4GHz,14.1 SXGA+
1GB,DDR,266MHz 2DIMM
60GB Ultra ATA Hard Drive
2x CD/DVD burner (DVD+RW/+R)
Intel Pro 2100 Wireless Card
Now that's a fine system, even considering the obligatory Microsoft tax and WinXp Home pre-installed. Check place like SlickDeals.net for Dell coupons and you should be able to get your system within $2,000-$2,500.
I'm sorry to say, as several other posters have already pointed out, that laptops are pretty much inconfigurable beyond "Do you want DVD or CDRW with that?" The best thing you can do if you are in the market is look for a model that most closely fits what you want to do with it, and how you will most likely use (abuse) it. For example, if you know you are rough with technology, might I suggest a Panasonic ToughBook? If you are looking for style and sophistication, perhaps Apple is calling your name? If you want a gaming platform, you can go with your alienware. Several manufacturers are coming out with 17" and widescreen laptops (Apple and Dell for example), and if you want something that can keep going on batteries for several hours, perhaps you should investigate Centrino laptops.
YOU must decide what is important in your new purchase, and decide how important. If customization and configurability is really that important, perhaps you are asking the wrong question? Maybe you should be asking, "Do I really need a laptop? What would a laptop give me that a regular computer will not, and can I live without it?"
I haven't lost my mind!
It is backed up on disk...somewhere...
You can't just go build a laptop from scratch. You can build awfully small portable computers, but at a certain point you have to get a little specialized. Until things get so small and compact that there becomes a standard component interface for laptops this will continue to be almost impossible without a team of engineers and some big-buck manufacturing tools.
The closest I ever saw was a laptop that used standard desktop processors; had two MiniPCI slots, two PC-Card slots and took the "relatively" standard 144 pin Micro-DIMM memory modules. This allowed for some flexibility but it came at a huge sacrifice for battery life (with the desktop processor)
Breaking it down:
1) Case: this is usually where it starts. The design of the system will be centered around how BIG it's supposed to be when it's done. Most everything follows the design of the case.
2) Motherboard: Laptop motherboards are nothing if not proprietary. 90% of the peripherals are built in. The only things that most modern laptops leave "off" the motherboard are ethernet, wireless lan, modems (and often not even all of those) Form follows form here. The motherboard is the largest component, so it generally takes the shape of whatever empty space is left after everything else goes in the case. Sometimes laptop motherboards are split into two or three pieces to twist around hard drives, cd-rom's and cooling equipment. Again, no standard form factor.
3) Peripherals: (sound/video/firewire/usb/serial/parallel/etc) None. It's all on the same board, remember? If you get a MiniPCI slot, you can find a few peripherals to plug into it (but nothing like what you can buy in a pci card). I know of the following MiniPCI peripherals:
Network Cards (you'll have to find somewhere to put the RJ45 port)
Wireless Network Cards (youll have to find somewhere to stash the antennas)
Modems (youll have to find somewhere to put the RJ11 plug)
Crypto accelerators (used in embedded devices like the Soekris router appliances)
4) HDD: ah ha. here you get lucky! You can get all manner of 2.5" HDD's up to and including some slick new 7200 RPM guys! Just watch your height and power requirements
5) Ram: Ditto. Typically dictated by the motherboard, though you do have some flexibility here
6) LCD: LVDS has helped a lot towards standardizing an interface between a laptop's graphics system and the screen itself, but you'll still need to find a compatible panel and LVDS driver. You can do some googling on LVDS if you want, but it's essentialy like a low level form of DVI. There are presently single, dual, and quad LVDS systems (based on how many pixels you need for a panel)
7) CPU: AFAIK, none of the manufacturers even sell their mobile CPU's in a socketed configuration. It's probably going to be built onto a motherboard.
Finally, very few companies actually make their own laptops. Most come OEM from some company in Taiwan, and even though some are assembled by the vendor, almost none are manufactured by other companies. Dell doesnt build their own laptops; I'd put lots of money on Alienware not making their own either. If you can find the OEM for alienware, and the same computer is not made exclusively for them, then you can get close to a "build your own" but if all that entails is selecting the screen, hard drive, ram, and color of the case, you're still a long way off.
~GoRK
Alienware's new m51 is supposed to let you swap out the graphics card and the processor for new ones.
- A standard ATX-portable motherboard footprint.
- A standard interface type for ATX-portable graphics cards
- A standard interface type for ATX-portable LCD panels
- A standard power supply connector and battery management unit to fit the above
- A standard case layout
This would in effect allow customers to buy an empty shell case, install the LCD panel of their choice, fit a motherboard, graphics card, memory and power supply unit of their choosing - and build their own machine. Yes, it might look a bit more clunky than some of the machines that we've become used to - but infinitely more customisable and there's nothing on the technology side that's stopping this from working. Consumers would gain with cheaper prices, manufacturers would gain through larger volumes shipped, a more competetive marketplace - and people upgrading and buying new components themselves. This would be a huge business opportunity for the first adopters of this approach - provided they keep the standards open.There are places you can go to get CUSTOM BUILT laptops, they are just not online stores or common chains. You need a plane ticked to Taiwan, or somewhere else in SE Asia.
A friend of mine picked up a custom laptop in Malaysia with 3GHz P4, with DVD burner, 1Gig Ram, and a slew of other features he wanted... for under $2500 Australian (that's ~$1700 US!!!)... The kicker is that this was back in February!
So it can be done... You just need to be holidaying in the area at the time...
"Go to CNN [for a] spell-checked, fact-checked summary" -- CmdrTaco
...but I have NFI what your requirements are.
I had similar problems when shopping for a laptop. The issue wasn't so much that the vendors sucked, it had more to do with all the compromises made to make the things portable. You can't ask for a top of the line processor, top of the line video card, a display that handles 1600 by 1200 @ 16ms refresh rate, and then have 8 hours of battery life. Saavy?
So how about listing the requirements?
"Derp de derp."
I was looking for a laptop in early 2001 and couldn't find what I wanted. Battery life was a big problem. Not saying this is right for everybody, but you should lay out all your options on the table. Take the best (and closest to what you're looking for) configuration from Dell, Toshiba, IBM, Alienware, Apple, HP, Sony, etc., and then decide among those. You've got options; just don't expect to find them all in one place. I ended up being happiest with an Apple notebook, and it was a suprising and drastic move for me to switch from Windows. But the price and feature set was right and I've been very happy with my decision. I think my second choice was a Dell, because I figured if they didn't have what I wanted, at least I wouldn't be spending a fortune only to be broke when my "perfect" laptop came out. Still hasn't happened, though that 12" TiBook is getting closer.
So my recommendation is to line up your options from the various websites and pick your favorite. At least you don't have to go store to store; you can do all your comparison shopping online.
Alex.
From Alienware:
Weight: 9.6lbs. w/ Battery
Heh. So what exactly are you looking for? I find it funny that you bitch about options but have no problem with the weight of these machines. I once bought a dell inspiron 7500 (w/ 15.4" screen!) and it weighed 9lbs. 9.6lbs is *soooo* heavy, you should just by a desktop. Anyway, as others have said, a dell will have what you need for less. Maybe you should change your tune. I have a c400 (2.9lbs) with 500 MB RAM and a 1.2GHz processor and a 19" lcd for less than these machines.
-Sean
Excellent collection of info, btw.
Regarding newer laptops and CPU sockets:
I upgraded my Sony GRX570 (1.6Ghz) to a 2.0Ghz because it's a socketed P4-M platform.
Before CPU removal.
After CPU removal.
The entire post is at Vaio Village for those curious. (Yes, same username)
-- I'd say your post was about 3 monkeys, 18 minutes.
not sure what you're looking for, but i'd had a similar "why doesn't anyone want to sell what i want to buy" feeling for quite a while re the laptop market.
...
:)
the x1000 was what i had been waiting for - i didn't have to buy anything i didn't want, got a good video card (9200), decent linux support, pentium m, no wifi (i'll get a pcmcia card if i ever want it),
hpshopping.com, and look for coupons. the most configurable laptop that i'd seen, and decent prices even without mail in rebates (another bain of the laptop market).
though now that i have it, i don't know wtf to do with it - it just sits next to my desktop and i mostly ssh in
My blog
if you want an alienware-etreme style laptop, just look at the manufacturer who makes them. http://www.sagernotebook.com . Alienware laptops are just the sager notebooks with pretty colors and an alienware sticker(you'll find many laptops on the market are made be the same manufacturer, with the campanies logo slapped on it). Also check out http://pctorque.com/ same situation, the alienware computer without the alienware hype. Deck out one of those and its gonna be half the price of a basic alienware. If you want power and battery life though, I would deffinately put out the money and get a pentium M based system. Your gonna pay more, but the performance is fantastic, and battery life is amazing.
Target: writers, programmers, sysadmins
no j-key or trackpad/ball
text, no graphics, no color
PC compabtible x86 128mb ram, [1|5]gb hd
Happy Hacker keyboard
B&W LCD screen very readable in bright sun
Clamshell case, can open flat on a table
132x60 character screen
no fan or hot case
2-day battery life
pcmcia slot
sb compatible card, headphone out, mic in
ethernet and serial
Cheers,
Bill
bamph
I recently bought a (2.4GHz P4 1G RAM 60G hard drive DVD-CDRW 802.11b card) Lapdog laptop from eRacks.com for around $2200 and have been very pleased with it. eRacks.com will custom configure the machine with your choice of distributions (OpenBSD, various Linuxes, etc.) and the staff is very helpful and friendly. http://www.eracks.com
Like you, I've always wanted to build my own laptop but sadly, the parts are not usually available. Part of the reason is that a lot of parts are custom engineered.
Personally, I don't understand why there is no standardization of parts like regular PCs. You would think that standardizing would help create cheaper, upgradable laptops.
It's mostly custom proprietary hardware. your choices are limited.
You might want to look for barebone laptops/notebooks on Google. There are only a few dozen (at best) that sell these. Usually the same companies have laptop/notebook motherboards also for sale individually.
Dell laptops are typically some of the most upgradable PC-based laptops out there. (Although it's an increasing trend in upgradability in general.)
The Dell Inspiron 8000 series allowed upgrades to:
CPU (socketed)
Video card (Socketed in a special package)
RAM (SODIMMS like everyone else)
HD
Optical drives
They had multiple display options, but that was something you could only choose at purchase time.
Compatible laptops in the C-series 8000s were the 8000, the 8100, and 8200. A very common upgrade (which made Slashdot) was to upgrade an I8000's GeForce 2 Go to the GeForce 4 440 Go (GF4 440MX) from the 8200. You could also buy socketed P4-M processors to upgrade the 8200. I've heard rumors that the "Precision" variant of the I8000 had a Quadro option that was the equivalent of a GeForce 4 4200 Go (i.e. a Ti4200), so the 8x00s might be upgradable to GF4Ti specs.
The new 8500 is not socket-compatible with the previous 8000s, neither is it media-bay compatible. The CPU socket might be the same, the video cards are a new form factor though. It will probably be upgradable with parts from one or two successor generations, like the 8000 could accept many parts designed for the 8100 and 8200.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
If you check out my journal you will get a detailed description of what I've been doing and why. In a nutshell: I'm trying to build a handheld computer that delivers adequate performance with maximum flexibility and battery life. The target design will have a small (7-8 inch) VGA screen, a moderately slow processor (100-200 MHz ARM), moderately sized hard disk (10-20 GB, 2" IDE), a moderate amount of RAM (32-256 MB), and run off of conventional rechargable batteries (8 AA NiMH cells) for at least 8-hours on a single charge.
Just to build the prototype will take several months and cost at least $1000 (probably several times that, when all is said and done). If I go to production, I can probably get the cost down to $300 per unit (not counting NRE costs), but the selling price will still be up in the $500 range.
The only way I am able to do any of this is that I am abandoning any kind of PC compatability: This device will never be able to run Windows or play flashy games (though it will run a regular, non-embedded, version of Linux). I've had to give up on all kinds of features that seemed like they should be simple: I don't have a clamshell case because the engineering is too complex for me to do myself and I don't have a keybaord because I couldn't find a source for laptop-style keyboards. I'm still holding out for polymer-LiION batteries, but I haven't found anywhere that builds them on contract, yet.
This is not the same sort of task as building a desktop computer from white-box parts (which is only slightly harder than plugging together lego blocks). This is much closer to actual engineering: I'll be constructing some of my own breadboards to connect the SBC to the LCD and the IDE hard disk, as well as custom hardware to charge and monitor the batteries.
Its not *completely* custom, but IBM doesn't publish its full laptop lineup. If you call them up and find a human to talk to (at least if you're an employee), you can tell them what you're looking for and they'll find a base system that fits and then customize the components to match your needs.
For example, did you know you can get the Thinkpad X31 (their top of the line ultralight) with the high resolution screen that you usually only find on the R series? Throw in a high-capacity battery, 802.11g mini-PCI card, and max out the memory and hard drive, and you've got a pretty sweet machine
http://chrismetcalf.net
Just get a D3ll, d00d!
everyone knows IBM makes the best laptops, and if you had more hands on real life practice with chix0rs you'd know how to use and navigate with a nipple. nerds running linux on some gay ass dell or alienware piece can buck deez nutz and phear my thinkpad T40 running obsd. w00t
just get a Dell Precision M-series laptop with everything as maxed out as you can afford.
I didn't imagine such a no-compromise laptop existed before a colleague insisted I buy one when I was looking for a laptop. My m40 (single configuration, now they let you choose how much RAM etc you get, like other laptops) was worth every penny, although it's very dated now. I think the current model is the m60.
That's because early Inspiron 8000 are derived from the Latitude C family (C800 and the like), which is the bussinness line (only difference is a bit in the BIOS) and the new Inspiron 8500 are (probably) dervied from dell's new business family, the Latitude D...
#include "coucou.h"
www.designapc.com You can make entry-level and high-end custom laptops and pcs for cheap. Great place. :-)
Dell refers to all of the older 8000-series (and all of their mediabay-compatible brethren) as C-series laptops.
Basically anything Dell made at that time was a C-series.
Their newest generation are referred to as the D-series.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
http://www.mgepconline.com/product_details_conf
You can configure them any way you want, they use real athlon processors, desktop RAM, and are full of great features.
---- "Excuse me. Where's the children's gun section?"
If I seemed vague I apologize, it seemed patently obvious that if alienware is the yardstick (excepting cost) I am using then they would have the "specs" I would like to incorporate. I suppose I should have explained the salient points of the project idea as well as EXACTLY how I would like the machine to behave and the reasons behind it. By the way the modded up helpdesk comment was cute I almost bit on that troll feed. I'll call the project idea openlaptop for convenience. Most laptops do not have Linux friendly hardware, software emulation is rife. For a good bit folks were buying Sony because they had hardware modems etc. To me a laptop should not have any hardware which uses software emulation. All the hardware should have available specs to code drivers from. Those are the first two firm rules. I am in love with building things from scratch/customizing things to perform better than what I can buy, everything from my car to my home is something that I put allot of effort and time into. WHY NOT MY LAPTOP? I do not like the bundles offered by companies like dell *insert company name here* I don?t want to buy them. For those of you who are satisfied with the obvious crap hardware being shoved down our throats then great. Enjoy. I am going to approach things in the way that the actual open source community approaches things. If I don?t like something come up with a better mousetrap and do something about it. So on to the specs. I may be in the minority but since I am not a road warrior I?m not all that concerned about weight a factor that has been mentioned several times. Due to my build a 9 pound notebook is not exactly heavy to me. So I rule weight out as an option. Things that are important to me however are, screen size/resolution, battery life, and processor and ram speeds. As well as keyboard size. I?m not a big fan of the newer keyboard configs either, a layout on a notebook similar to the happy hacker keyboard with the ctrl key where it should be. No windows keys etc. would please me muchly. So my hardware specs run something like this. Pentium mx chip 3.0 GHz or faster. Built in wifi with prism 2 chipset. Keyboard layout as listed above. 17 inch screen geforce go or ati portable chipset. Hardware modem. Gigabit ethernet. Swap bay at least two pci mca slots. Rear panel is basically the same as IBM two ps2 ports one lpt 2 to 4 USB. I want at least two hours of battery life using Gentoo with fluxbox as the manager. Id like it if the fsb was the fastest available for a notebook. Im taking the baby steps right now in this project claying up a model of how I want the notebook to look. Since I have worked with carbon fiber previously and have been impressed by the tensile strenght and heat resistance of the material I was thinking of going that route for the chassis with some sort of light metal inner framework ala the titanium chassis of the t series IBM laptops. Now the point of the project even though I could go on for hours about ideas and how they may be achieved. I want to offer the plans to build the notebook for free on the web. Basically a build your own Linux friendly notebook how-to. With sources of hardware etc. I KNOW that people selling Mac clones were getting access to the closed market Mac motherboards for kits. Why can't we do the same for laptops? I am not looking to make a profit here merely for a way for me to build my perfect lappy hopefully for one half to three quarters the price of comparable systems and actually GET what *I* want out of it. I want to say thanks to everyone that posted even semi useful information. As to the parasites that can?t post anything useful, hmm I didn't expect so many. I must be new around here.
Panel F, Relay #70
When I am elected president, all laptop ads will be required to prominently list the weight, and all price search engines will have a weight option.