Spektyr

My recent induction to and experience with laptop repair and upgrading has gotten me thinking: these things are actually pretty cool. Not desktop cool, but cool in their own right.

However, I have never bought a computer that was made by anyone other than myself. Whether it was a frankenbox slapped together out of any spare parts I could find or a super-gaming machine I lovingly crafted out of individually hand-picked parts, I've built every computer I've owned since I graduated from C-64's.

Is there anything like this available to laptops? I've seen eBay listings for various parts of various laptops, and it wouldn't be terribly difficult to assemble an existing type of laptop out of pieces of one. What I'm wondering is to what extent there's a standardization or customization for these things. I imagine you can't simply swap most components in a Sony and a Dell without at the very least accomplishing nothing. (Unlike most desktops where a video card is a video card, taking into account AGP vs PCI and such.)


So assuming I'm approaching this from the DIY perspective, what is it I'm looking for? Are there any laptop brands that are less jealously proprietary than the others? Are any of them more flexibly designed?

To compare it to automobiles, I'm not looking for a Ferrari or a Rolls Royce (which need highly specialized training to do more than check the oil), I'm looking for a basic domestic car like the Mustang or Chevelle were years ago. Decently fun cars that weren't impractical, but if you wanted to you could pop the hood under a shade tree and with some patience, elbow grease, and some cash, turn the thing into a street monster.

Basically I like to make my computers "mine". Not just a (fill in the blank) model. More of "yeah, this is Toshiba Thing-a-ma-jig, but I've done a little tinkering under the hood so it's not exactly stock."


Just so you know, I'm not some wet-behind-the-ears geek. I've got military training in electronics so I'm not afraid of (or likely to fumble) anything inside a computer. I'm just trying to bridge what I know with desktops over to the portable cousins.

ebackhus

You and I share the same vision. So does my cousin. As of this moment there are no off-the-shelf laptop cards except PCMCIA cards, Mini-PCI cards, and RAM. ASUS technologies does have plans to make a DIY laptop system but I don't know much about that.

Fox

Biggest issue I've seen is that there's been no standardization for the peripheral drives of laptops. For the most part, one laptop hard drive should work with any laptop. Unfortunately, as you probably already know, this doesn't apply to the CD-Rom drive, floppy drive, or battery. You'd also probably have problems with setting the screen up correctly as I think most brands have their own way of doing things.

Assuming you could find parts that work with each other, the hard part would be getting them to fit in one tiny case. This is where the car to automobile comparison really comes into play: older cars, for example those old huge fords and chevys, could handle a reasonably bold engine swap, because the innards were simple enough that they could jive with a little work. Like new cars (especally japanese imports), laptops are made with compactness in mind, and every one has its own layout and method of assembly. When my one laptop broke, I couldn't even open the stupid thing the whole way because it was put together in such a complicated way. There are disassembly guides, but unless you can find them you're pretty much out of luck if you have one like I had.

That said, if you're going about this just as a learning experience, go for it. I think it would be fun to make a totally impractical laptop out of a metal "pizza box" and run it off a motorcycle battery. But if this is to save money, you probably won't succeed. But it's clear from your post that you have the experience if you do plan on trying it.

Spektyr

Yeah, the fact that I can't find barebones laptop kits for sale, empty laptop cases, and so on pretty much answered that part of it for me. I'm wondering more about whether there's a particular brand of laptop that is better suited to geekish tinkering than others.

If you want to think of it this way - if one manufacturer had to become the industry standard for all other laptops to become compatible with hardware-wise, who would that be? (I'm asking from a techie point of view, not an economic power standpoint.)


Another way to look at it: what laptop brand is least designed to be disposable? 4-5 years down the road when the software demands have risen beyond the capabilities of most modern computers, are there any current laptops that will be able to upgrade to meet the higher demands?


For example, my wife's laptop: Dell 2600 Inspiron... half a gig memory - max. 16mb video card was the biggest thing offered (and therefore the biggest thing compatible). I believe there's a 1.3Ghz processor you can shoehorn in - if you can find it.

And that's it. That's all it will do.

My desktops never go obsolete. Simple attrition keeps them up to date... the oldest, least 'uber' thing is probably what will break next and get replaced by something modern. Little by little they climb the ladder (albeit a couple rungs below the "top").

I'm looking for something (if it exists) in a laptop that, while obviously not that upgradeable, wasn't designed specifically to be thrown away and replaced every few years. Something you can pop the hood on and put a few extra ponies in it when the new kids start smoking you at the track, if you will.