Building a custom laptop from the ground up ...

Ok - so I'm not exactly sure how to ask this question properly but here goes. If I were interested in actually building a custom laptop from the ground up, what would you suggest my first steps be in terms of suppliers?

To be honest, I have been looking for a certain style of laptop for some time and, as of yet, have found my particualr niche to be under served. Although it never seemed to be a feasible option, I was wondering what the actual process would be to actual fill the void in my niche myself. Sourcing the CPU, RAM, HDDs, etc. wouldn't be too hard from local suppliers as I'm located in Vancouver, BC, Canada. It seems to me the most difficult part would be to find the right base chasis/mobo to build off of in the first place. Now are these barebones sytems difficult to acquire at a reasonable price? I have the technical know-how at my disposal to do all of the work so it's jsut getting the pieces that's the key.

There are a lot of basics that are as evident to me as anyone else: purchasing power, sourcing, etc. These facts aside I would still like to try and see this through to get an idea of what it would really take to build my on flavour of laptop, tailored preciesly to my needs.

Any help would be greatly appreciated and I look forward to your responses.

 

well, the closest to a "built from the ground up" laptop that I can think of is a one from powernotebooks.com.
just order it with the standard options and order the HD,RAM, OS, ect that you want from some place like newegg.com or a similar site.

 

It depends what you mean by a reasonable price and what kind of specs do you want in a laptop.

Check out Milestonepc.com for barebones.

You can get a Compal HEL80 barebone with 15.4 WSXGA screen with go7600 or an VBI(verfied by Intel) Asus S96j barebone with 15.4Wxga with ATI x1600 or if you want an 14.1 inch laptop then you can check out the Compal HGL30 barebone with the WXGA screen and go7600.

Also watch out for chrisyano post on his thoughts on barebones vs. professionally built systems

 

RJTech sells barebones laptop chassis, including Asus, Clevo, Compal and MSI. And their prices are rather good.

 

Thanks guys - gives me something to start with and I will check out the chrisyano post when I have a sec this morning.

 

The main barebones nowadays are Clevo, ASUS, MSI, Compal among other smaller ones too.

Check their repective forums for a list of dealers

 

jeesh where was this info a month ago before I bought my Lenovo?!
I'd rather build my notebook the way I like it(dual hard drive, no optical, maxed out ram etc) than buy one and tear things out and replace them. In actuality, the prices arent all that different though. I spent about $600 on my cheapo Lenovo. It functions pretty well so far, though I havent traveled it much. It does excel in upgradeability. The cpu, HDD and ram are easily accessed with just a small phillips.
I gotta say, after pricing what I would want to build from RJ and the others like Mwave, the only real advantage is being able to specify winXP Pro instead of Vista. And possibly avoiding all the bloatware crud that infests all new computer products (even my new USB 2.0 drive!). The price differential is negligble. Whereas with my Lenovo, I actually save money if I buy the notebook with least ram and CPU and upgrade them myself!
I am still convinced there has to be a gray market white box vendor out there selling Asus, MSI and the elusive Gigabytes for dirt cheap. Thats where I got most of my desktop stuff.

 

Im from Vancouver, and I found it was WAY cheaper to buy a barebone S96J from gentechpc.com, and have it shipped to a US P.O. that I had access to. Same thing with Newegg for the rest of the parts.

Good luck with it.