Building a custom laptop

[SmokeyTheBlair]

Here's the pre-topic narrative.

 

My sister is visually impaired. She isn't 100% blind, but if a percentage had to be applied, it would probably be around 95%. She has found herself a job with the City of Guelph (Ontario, Canada). She is also attending university, and performs volunteer work for Guiding Eyes for the Blind whenever she can. Hard worker all around. 

 

The software she uses, ZoomText, is the only one she is comfortable using. The system requirements aren't very high, but by its nature, it is meant to be used with other software, bringing those requirements up significantly. To that end, she has to get a new laptop every 2 years or so.

 

Two weeks ago, her wife was performing system updates on her Dell Inspiron 17 5755 2.2ghz system, and during one of the reboot cycles, the system went to black screen, fan went full and the system stayed that way. She thought it was normal and left it for two hours. When it didn't come back, she forced a reboot and the system wouldn't respond. As I am the family tech, it fell to me.

 

I already knew what the problem most likely was, but I was hoping to rule out whatever other possibilities there were first. I could take you through my process, but suffice it to say, it didn't take long to determine that the motherboard was shot. 

 

I've been a couple weeks following leads and searching a few places for a replacement. I called Dell as well and even called some tech recycle places. I'm looking at no less than $220 CAD unless I want to get a damaged board from an Ebay seller who cannot verify if the boards even work.  They have descriptions like "Broken port" with no indication of exactly which port is broken.  I'm not great at soldering, but if it's just a bent pin or something simple like that, I can work with it. 

 

This whole process got me looking at alternatives. We all know how laptops work. Specific parts for specific models. 

 

For the tl;dr people, here's the main subject.

 

What about universal laptop designs? Treating a laptop like a PC.  Using risers, extensions, some makeshift and jury rigged clips and connections, that kind of thing. After all, there are generic, universal boards available, so there must be something to this.

 

Has anyone build a custom laptop? Any ideas or suggestions? Price range?  Also, got pics to show off your work?

 

Also, if anyone has any suggestions for the Dell issue, I'd love some input. I've only recently gotten back into this field and while my Google-Fu is strong, I know there are resources I haven't heard of or considered. After all, I'm from the era of NCIX and some YouTube guy that used to work there said it isn't a thing anymore.

 

[badreg]

A laptop requires a custom chassis to fit a custom logic board with soldered components (CPU, GPU and sometimes RAM), custom battery and custom display. Unless you are an OEM, you're probably not building your own custom laptop.

 

That said, you can build an AIO rig that is small enough to fit inside a briefcase, but I don't know if that is sufficient for your purposes.

[SmokeyTheBlair]

21 minutes ago, badreg said:

A laptop requires a custom chassis to fit a custom logic board with soldered components

Yeah I know that, but there are also universal boards available that allow for customization. It's tighter tolerances with laptops for sure, but just like you can build a custom case, you could build a custom laptop as well. Nothing like the slim form factors available from manufacturers, but the possibility exists. 

 

Are you talking about using boards like that for the AIO type systems you're referring to? I can see her possibly using something along those lines if the performance and portability aren't compromised.

 

It's probably not going to be the route I take for her anyway since I know for sure I cannot build one for less than the price of the board replacement, but I will likely be mocking up a quote for myself, just for fun.

[badreg]

12 minutes ago, SmokeyTheBlair said:

there are also universal boards available that allow for customization.

What universal boards? Laptop logic boards are made to order for OEMs, and AFAIK, there are no modern boards that are available to the public. The closest that you can get are desktop ITX boards. If you go down this route, it will be very hard to build a system that is under 10lbs. And if you require a custom chassis that is as thin as a laptop, you will also need to design your own thermal solution.

 

What are you trying to achieve that an off-the-shelf laptop is not able to do?

[Wh0_Am_1]

Laptops are compact PCs, they need to be as light as possible, as cool as possible, as rugged as possible, and as powerful as possible, whilst still maintaining a price that people are willing to spend, thereby each laptop has custom boards made en masse, as a result of this what you are asking for is nearly impossible in a laptop form factor, quite literally the closest that you can get to this at the moment (with no guarantees) is the Dell Alienware 51M (Dell's website)  and I would hardly call that a laptop.

[Radium_Angel]

1 hour ago, SmokeyTheBlair said:

Has anyone build a custom laptop?

In a prior career, I built custom laptops for rich clients.

Stuff no one else had, all bespoke to the user's desires.

Prices started at $5,000 US and went up from there.

 

There are currently no laptops available in the past ~10 years that couldn't handle anything and everything she needs. What once was a many thousand dollar laptop even 6 years ago, is now practically given away.

 

[CyL0]

@SmokeyTheBlair I was just in love with few Dell models,I got the cheapest ones possible, used ofcourse, and I upgraded them. I remember having a Precision I think? which I got from a local used parts market website for I think about 180EUR (few years ago probably 2012-2013, don't remember the exact model), it was refurb one with poor 2nd gen i3, probably even 4gb ram, but I think it was just 2gb and 250gb hdd...They probably stripped it so they could sell the more expencive stuff and put inside just what was on the shelves in their firm I think.. It was a great platform to turn it to a great laptop for many years to use (and indeed I did).

I was lucky to find an alienware laptop, it was exactly what I was looking for, it had bad motherboard, I just harvested i7 2960XM and 16GB ram (which I later swapped with 32GB as 8gb sticks got cheaper), and I sold the rest (except motherboard) for pieces and got actually more than I paid for! I was actually looking for the best deal possible, I used that technique many times before (and after), that's also how I got 2x 256GB SSD from Intenso, cheap (100EUR for both in '12/'13) but fast SATA ssd's and the only thing I bought new were HDD WD scorpio black 750GB 7200rpm and HDD caddy I used to put this WD instead of CD-ROM... 

 

It actually took me about 2 months to get to the final config, but I think the cost of everything (if I sum up how much I paid for laptop and later for parts and then got back selling what was left), was under 500EUR (755CAD), which was a great price for a laptop that sold with slower config for 2x the price... It was also a personal reward as I enjoy doing stuff like this... I swapped it over a year ago for 2x mac pro 5.1 (w3530, 16gb, 5770, 500gb), mac pro 4,1 (W3520, 8GB, 4870, 320GB) and dell ultrasharp U3011 monitor... Great deal again, I've spent quite a lot on dual cpu trays, RAM and GPU, I also upgraded all to max (+ flashed 4,1 to 5,1), sold two of them and left with super upgraded 5,1 with dual 6-core CPUs, 64GB ECC, RX 580 (custom flash again) and I/m still rocking those 2x 256GB SSDs + 2x 1TB + I recently got samsung NVM-E 960 SSD with pci-e adapter and made it bootable, and it's really fast! The machine is simply powerfull enough to handle everything. I'm now OK for quite some time and am meanwhile working on another laptop I bought for really cheap... 

 

So if you're just a bit tech savy, you enjoy tech, with little time and patience you can build amazing machine... You won't build a laptop from scratch, but you can upgrade it a lot if you buy right... Nowadays many laptops have soldered CPUs but you can still find like a crappy older comp and turn it into a good one... I've just remembered my mom's toshiba satellite C55A, with crappy Celeron, 4GB and 500GB hdd... Now it has 3rd gen i7, 8GB, SSD + HDD and thing is still rocking for everyday internet/office/multimedia use... So do a little research and you'll see options... 3rd and 4th gen i7 4-core cpus (37xx, 47xx) are still pretty fast and really cheap, so find a laptop with decent chipset and crappy specs and just go with it and put the most powerfull you can get (mind the hardware support). If you do it smart, you'll end with great laptop. I bet you can put together i7 48xx, 8gb, 256SSD laptop for less than $300 (with spare parts sold) if you just dig into ,)

 

P.S.: One of my favourite older models, pretty cheap already and good specs, just no SSD... https://www.amazon.com/Latitude-E6540-15-6-LED-Notebook/dp/B00E7LX8IO