Custom Laptop building/upgrading forums?

[AlienBZ]

I'm an IT student to be starting school next month in the computer repair field, and I happen to be a laptop fan (but will not neglect desktop PC's), and I'm interested in learning how to build laptops (though many people steer away from this themselves, or wouldn't recommend this, but that's them, not me).

Could you please recommend me some sites where people custom build/upgrade laptops?




Thanks in advance.

[jolly17]

This is an interesting question!

I remember about 3 or 4 years ago there was a big push for "whitebooks" but it seems to have died down now. If you do a search for "laptop barebones" you will find all that old info, still good info. Looks like MSI is the only one left, or the only major one left now. They still sell Whitebooks (brand name!). It will be a bit more trouble sourcing the parts and definitly more expensive for the same specs, plus the cost of Windows, but you can customize a lot of it.

The other obvious option is to try and make some money from fixing laptops. Not a great business model, but you can find all sorts of deals on broken laptops on eBay and CraigsList. Not wroth the cost of fixing for the average person, but say you find a sale for a Toshiba model x123 that has a broken screen, then you find another Toshiba model x123 with a bad mobo, well! You can buy both and use the parts to make one good Toshiba model x123! If the working parts match up (always a risk on eBay/CL) then you can "combine" laptops this way quite easily. Plus, they're already broken! No need to worry abot breaking them!

Most regular laptops die often from some broken part because they're cheap and flimsy. The owners are bound to break something! Others like Thinkpads or Elitebooks don't break very much, so those will be hard to find. I really like THinkpads! You should probably get one just for kicks and testing. You can find old PentiumM Thinkpads on CL for like $100 or less. They still work, too!

[mjc]

The reason most don't 'recommend' it...is because

A) There is not much of a market for it...because

1) Manufacturers don't, as a general rule, make/sell them to be 'components'. They sell complete units.

2) Those that do exist are not really worth the price that is being charged.

3) They are not exactly the easiest thing to work on. You have a very limited amount of space and you can only do so much with it, before you overcrowd it so much you have a coffee warmer instead of a computer.

B) The basic design of a laptop does not lend itself very well to small scale manufacturing/assembly. This in and of itself greatly limits what can be done.

C) Never really found any SITE devoted to 'custom building' laptops...seen lots of articles here or there, but not anything even remotely approaching something like this site, let alone even the more hardware specific/modding type sites. It's kind of like trying to find a site devoted to hotrodding a Yugo...

[jolly17]

LOL
But my Yugo is awesome! I want it to do more!!