Can you cut a single board computer to make it thinner?

[Legolessed]

I want to make a netbook that is capable of just running movies and web browsing and Omar first I was going to use a normal laptop motherboard but those are suprisingly hard to come by so then I got onto the thought of single board computers. There's always the raspberry pi zero but I figured that would be under powered for anything so I looked to something like an orange pi. I saw an orange pi on Amazon for $13 but they are really tall. Is there any way you can cut off the ports to make the board shorter? Or should I just use a raspberry pi and hope that it can do the tasks above.

[vanished]

Depending on what you mean by "running movies", a Raspberry Pi might be just fine, or a bit of an issue.  See the details at the bottom of the post in the link in my sig.

[lieder1987]

A chrome book should be able to do all that and you are talking about 200ish bucks all in. Then just rip out what you need or don't.

 

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/all-laptops/chromebooks/pcmcat244900050010.c?id=pcmcat244900050010

[Jerped]

3 hours ago, Legolessed said:

I want to make a netbook that is capable of just running movies and web browsing and Omar first I was going to use a normal laptop motherboard but those are suprisingly hard to come by so then I got onto the thought of single board computers. There's always the raspberry pi zero but I figured that would be under powered for anything so I looked to something like an orange pi. I saw an orange pi on Amazon for $13 but they are really tall. Is there any way you can cut off the ports to make the board shorter? Or should I just use a raspberry pi and hope that it can do the tasks above.

If you were looking into a Pi and have a bigger budget (I'm talking between 90 and 150$ US) you should look at Lattepanda.

It's a really nice small windows machine with a quad-core processor and 2 to 4Gb RAM  They come with Windows Home pre-installed and activated.

Here is a plan of the board with the main functionalities:

You can see more details about it here: http://www.lattepanda.com/product-details/?pid=3

 

We used it at my last job for cloud workstations. I was impressed by how well it runs! If you can, I recommend strapping a small heatsink on it, because at 100% after a while it becomes really toasty. Other than that, it's awesome!

EDIT: found he heatsink with small fan. Costs around 12$ US: http://www.lattepanda.com/product-details/?pid=14

 

 

 

Otherwise you can look at Intel's Computer stick: http://www.intel.com/buy/us/en/product/desktop/intel-boxstck1a8lfc-atom-z3735f-133ghz-linux-usb-black-stick-pc-463163

 

I don't have anything to say about it though, I saw some articles about it a while ago.

 

[Mister Mister]

You can just desolder all the ports and solder in ribbon wires to the ones you need. It will be a pain but it will be alot shortened

[bob345]

You take a look at the pi zero?

[Legolessed]

13 hours ago, bob345 said:

You take a look at the pi zero?

Ya but the pi zero is sold out everywhere or costs $25 which is way more than what it is worth. I was looking at some of the orange ois and stuff like that which are power efficient and good for what I am doing but the USB port And the Ethernet jack are really tall