Anyone know how to build a laptop??

[Ymmy]

I need someone to point me in the right direction. i tried googling but nothing useful came up. there are thousands of guides out there for building pc, i need one for laptop. i don't even know where to go to get the casing/lcd for the laptop.

 

[John]

Since notebooks are usually very proprietary, I would not recommend piecing one together. Even Dell, HP, etc. have ODM's build their notebooks.

 

[mobobuff]

You'd have one hell of a time building a laptop from scratch because, unlike PCs, laptops do not have a standard form-factor. They're all proprietary (the companies make them however they see fit). If you wanted to build a laptop from scratch just to strike your fancy, you'd have to go on eBay and scavenge for parts, and after you got your first part you'd most likely have to buy only parts that would work with that part. So if you bought a "case" for an IBM ThinkPad 600E, you'd have to buy pretty much every other part that was included in 600Es, and then you'd need drivers... oy my head is spinning just thinking about it.

In short, you really can't build your very own custom laptop. They're a package deal.

 

[TheBoyBlunder]

Yeah. Go to www.dell.com and buy a laptop from 'em.

 

[WackyDan]

Originally posted by: TheBoyBlunder
Yeah. Go to www.dell.com and buy a laptop from 'em.

Or... if you want a Man's Notebook... Head on over to IBM and get a ThinkPad.

 

[chilled]

Originally posted by: WackyDan

Originally posted by: TheBoyBlunder
Yeah. Go to www.dell.com and buy a laptop from 'em.

Or... if you want a Man's Notebook... Head on over to IBM and get a ThinkPad.

lmao......but, he's right....get a thinkpad

Having said that I've got a Compaq Presario - but only beacause I couldn't afford a Thinkpad

 

[corkyg]

If you really want to play around - go to E-Bay and buy some laptop components. Suggest you stick to the same brand because there are no real standards. They are very proprietary. The market volume for such a venture is so small that it would most likely be cheaper to just buy one.

 

[formulav8]

I just bought the EMachines M6805 Athlon 64 Lappy. That I think can be classed as a mans lappy. Well, its for my wife though.


Jason

 

[Ymmy]

wow, so basically it's close to impossible to build a laptop

 

[Bleep]

I built a briefcase machine. I used one of those aluminum briefcases and a tiny motherboard with everything on board. No CD rom I use a usb CD rom when I need one. I found a 15 inch envision monitor cheap and removed the base and mounted it inside the lid, got one of those fold up keyboards and it is a little bigger than a laptop but one heck of a lot cheaper. I have mandrake 9.1 on it and use it a lot on trips.

Bleep

 

[drag]

Originally posted by: Ymmy
wow, so basically it's close to impossible to build a laptop

No it's not. It's just expensive.

I built one of those breifcase thingies, too. But I sucked at it, and it sucked.

Right now my idea is to build a machine out of a Mini-itx board.

I want to design it to last as long as possible on batteries, so here is my design:

Laptop harddrive.
MII6000 Mini-itx motherboard, with the 600mhz cpu.
It has a daughtercard for PCMCIA cards and flash cards. It also has a optional LVDS-based plugin for a daughterboard to support certian laptop-style LCD displays.
It has USB 2.0 and optional firewire.

Trouble is:
1. Laptop displays suck. They have no smarts built into them, and need a special controller that has scanlines and stuff like that to controll the LCD display. These are embedded into laptop vid cards or motherboards and are useless for anything else. They also require inverter (dc-ac) cards to light them up.

This is expensive, and has limited options. Via LVDS-01 module only support 8 different types of displays out of hundreds that are aviable, and those are only used in certain laptops. Those laptops also have different displays used in the same models that are incompatable.

Desktop-style LCD displays use to much power.

2. The Eden 600mhz cpu is slow. It's about equal to a 400 celeron in cpu power. It uses very little in the way of watts, but...

3. The motherboard and other componates aren't so nice. Together going full force a motherboard + 600mhz cpu + ram + IDE device uses close to 26 watts. Laptops use less then 20watts for "real" notebooks, (not the desktop replacement type). I want to get 10 hours of usable battery life out of it. Nimh battery pack can do that, but will weigh close to or over 2 pounds and extra weight sucks. Using a normal Laptop battery you'll get about a hour and a half out of it.

4. Price, total around 500-600 for the complete package.

You can go and buy a 700 dollar laptop and a extra 100 bucks on a battery pack and get 10x the performance.

Plus there is no garrentee that it will realy work. I could solder something wrong or spend a hundred bucks on the wrong display and then I would be screwed.


If you want a do-it-yourself setup, check out the "Desknote" series of laptops from ECS. These are cheap laptops that you buy and it will take desktop CPU's and memory, among other things. You can find these cheap, but they have no internal battery. External one is optional, but costs, and only lasts around a hour.

But they are truly portable desktop computer. But they are no laptop or notebooks.

 

[0roo0roo]

not built of standard parts for the most part. each company has their own strat for cramming the most into the least space possible. not like they have tower cases to work with. also makes sure that any component that breaks cannot easily be replaced. laptops are a pain.

and yes, there are generic laptops that use desktop chips etc, but they suck donkey balls. huge, clunky, battery hogs etc.

 

[drag]

Originally posted by: 0roo0roo
not built of standard parts for the most part. each company has their own strat for cramming the most into the least space possible. not like they have tower cases to work with. also makes sure that any component that breaks cannot easily be replaced. laptops are a pain.

and yes, there are generic laptops that use desktop chips etc, but they suck donkey balls. huge, clunky, battery hogs etc.

Ya, but people do still go out a buy alienware gaming laptops.



edit:
BTW, If anybody cares I just found out that the lvds connector for MEII-based modules are only aviable to OEM customers.