So, what do you need? I'll do a run-down on the "major components", but I'm really only going to spend much time on the ones that are more difficult to find.
Core components:
- Base-kit -- this is, by-far, the hardest piece to find in all of this, and certainly the most critical. These will typically include the mother board, power-supply, battery, display, keyboard and pointer, as well as all the chassis plastics. This is going to predicate most of your selections below.
- Video card -- incidentally, nVidia and Radeon both make some fairly glorious mobile graphics processors. As such, these are pretty-easy to find on-line.
- Hard disk -- your disk space. Duh!
- cd/dvd/bluray drive -- one beauty of building your own is that you don't even have to if you're hard-core, you may not even need such a thing (or you may want to use an external drive), but these are not difficult to find either.
- Wireless card -- sometimes these are integrated into the mother board, but a lot of times its a module you have to add. These are fairly trivial to find on-line.
- CPU -- the base-kit is going to predicate which CPU form-factor you can support, but these are easy enough to find on-line.
- Memory -- the base-kit, again, is going to predicate type and quantity.
The display is fairly straight-forward: you want to get the highest resolution display you can, in the size you want. Unfortunately you need a magic decoder-ring to understand the display-names and how they relate to features and resolution. There is a Wikipedia page that decodes these code-names and translates them to features. Since this is bundled in the base-kit, I'd settle on a lesser display if I got a mother board with all the features I wanted.
The motherboard is the pre-eminent component that governs all other aspects of your build. I'll go so far as to say that the number-one requirement for any mother board is that it support an independent video card... this ensures that you'll not get a crap graphics solution. Everything else, for the most part, is a balancing act. You want to get a mother board that support your CPU of choice, as well as the amount of memory you want/need. After that, all other features come in to play, such as its expansion slots, card-slots, etc. For my money, the big-three are maximum CPU support, quantity of memory, and support for an independent video card.
There are some big players in the base-kit market, most notably MSI. There are some others that provide good info too, such as Directron, but I didn't look at any of the primary suppliers from China, India or Taiwan, so I know there are a LOT more out there.
Simply put, I think you'll find its not too difficult to scrounge-up the parts, so why not build your own laptop? I'll tell you why: warranty. While the majority of your components will come with a 90-day or 1-year warranty, you won't get any sort of extended or 3-year warranty, and as someone who's had four laptops in the last three years, I can tell you that an extended warranty is a good idea if you do a lot of mobile computing -- for me, I've gone through so many laptops because I carry it with me all the time and routinely work at between two and four sites each day -- including putting my laptop in my backpack, putting it in my car, etc... my laptops get a LOT of wear and tear, probably more than the average user.
Anywho, hopefully this is some help.
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