Make Yourself a Laptop or Notebook: BareBones, White Box and DIY Machines
Do you want to build a custom made laptop or notebook?
Here is a collection of free do-it-yourself explanations.
If you have written about your barebone experience (or if you
know of a guide not linked here), please
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The orignal version of the briefcase laptop was simply a desktop PC dismembered and crammed into a briefcase. All essential components are included (minus a monitor). The final version of the briefcase laptop was a complete, free-standing, mobile computing system that could be set up anywhere that an electrical outlet was handy.
Ever felt like building your own laptop from (almost literally) scratch? This is a microcontroller-based "laptop" built from the ground up from a handful of chips and other hardware found lying around.
This guide explains how to build a custom laptop with a Mini-ITX motherboard inside. Imagine to upgrade every component as they grew too old. For very little money, here is a 2GHz processor laptop with 1GB RAM, and an ATI Radeon 9200 128MB graphics card.
This is a selfmade Propeller laptop - with a 6502 co-processor and 64K of static RAM! The hardware for this computer is minimal. The entire address space of the 6502 is devoted to a single 64K static RAM chip. The system includes no ROM in the 6502 memory map, no startup BIOS, nor any dedicated I/O at any address. The machine is built inside a toy laptop which had a real keyboard. The screen comes from a portable DVD player.
This HOWTO describes how to convert a Wii into a laptop, starting with the disassembly of the unit, initial computer drawings, and "reworking" of the heat sink.
How to build a custom laptop: laptops were perceived as a hard compromise between performance, size, battery life, and price. More often than not, you got to pick two of those four things, or three if you were lucky. The nice thing about building your own barebone laptop is that you have control over what parts you put in it.