building a notebook / laptop

[sweenster]

has anyone ever built a laptop or notebook from scratch in the same way as a PC?

I'm half thinking of buying a laptop but was wondering if anyone knows where to buy components. Hard drive, and memory are easy enough to find but motherboard, processor and case are proving more challenging.

[Horus Kol]

The problem with doing this is that so many components are specific to manufacturers, and even to series... for example a HDD for a Dell Inspiron is only fit for a Dell Inspiron.

You won't find any third party stuff for the internal part of a laptop, I'm afraid.

[xiaodao]

build notebook? that is cool, but i think no many can do it

[Roelf]

the problem with notebooks is, when you want to get them small, it's hard to design because of the airflow needed for cooling. If you don't want to melt your components, make sure you create enough space for the air to breeze through the machine.

[Antoniohawk]

Yeah, as Roelf said, it's not really finding the components, it's designing the thing to not melt through the case or give you third degree burns during use. I'm not a hardware genius, but I think that that is the main reason that laptops are higher priced than desktops, because you are paying for that portability, which is a hard thing to do. You may run into some monstrous problems with the lcd because I think that the controller is built-in to the motherboard and you would have to buy a pair that works together.

[liorean]

Well, there are some outfits that let's you chose what components, from a list, to drop into your laptop, but I've never seen an outfit that allows third party detais except for those that are easy to change. Harddrive or RAM for instance.

Usually, the problem is that you want something that is actually usable speed, but still not too hot, and where components are placed on the boards as to match the internal airflow and heat spread of the laptop. For instance, outfits such as Apple designs their circuitry and casing together to opt for the best possible heat spread and cooling, while keeping separate temperature zones that can be separately monitored and handled. The CPU, GPU and memory are hot things. The battery, CD/DVD reader/writer and harddrive are cooler parts. (They can get hot, especially the hard drive, but that's the reason you have lower speed drives on portables - to achieve a stable transmission rate without getting too hot.) There are also some things you can do for indirect cooling, such as heatspreading metal sheets. All of these require laying the case and boards out to match eachother.