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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."
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