R i g h t a r d i a: Building a laptop

Sunday, August 1, 2010

Building a laptop

You can purchase a laptop for around $300 at Wal-Mart. Rightardia decided to build one using parts from Ebay.

We started by purchasing a bare bones HP NC 8000 laptop on Ebay. It came with a 1.7GhZ CPu, 512 MB RAM and a DVD player. The laptop cost $81.00 from Reclamere in Tyrone, PA. We have seen this laptop from other sellers on Ebay for under $50.00.Rightardia was able to get the laptop operational with a 1OGB hard drive, 512MB RAM, Linux Mint and an 802.11g wireless adapter. .

We had to purchase an external power supply and a hard drive caddy for the expansion slot. The power supply cost $9.72 and the caddy cost $12.99. We also bought a used port replicator for $9.99, a HP laptop bag, a 802.11n wireless USB device (D-LINK DWA-140 WIRELESS N USB ADAPTER DLINK 802.11n) for $20.00 and another GB or RAM for $30.00.

We purchased the missing parts form Hong Kong to save money. We got the HP NC8000 to work for $104.00, but this price didn't include shipping. Be prepared for a two week wait or longer for Chinese parts.

We also decided to upgrade the 10GB HD we had on hand wih a Toshiba 60GB drive that cost $30.00. So for another $80.00, you can have a 60GB HD, another 1GB of RAM and a speedy wireless INTERNET connection. The total is now up to $184.00.

We recommend the 802.11n wireless USB adapter if you have an 802.11n gateway/router in you home. It was big improvement to the Netgear 802.11g wireless adapter we had been using.

We got a real HP case for $10 dollars and a port replicator for another $10 bucks. The port replicator offers:

Dual 2.0 USB ports
PS / 2 compatibility
VGA
Digital video out
S-Video
Serial port
SPDIF audio
Audio in/out
IEEE 1394 firewire
10/100 ethernet

The operating system was free because we used Ubuntu Linux mint which worked great! We also recommend you purchase a laptop bag or case. If you have any laptop parts around your house, you may be able to trim these costs even more.

In summary, you can put together a nice laptop kit with case, upgrades and a port replicator for under $200. A key issue is the operating system. Linux Mint runs great on older laptops and is free. Expect performance losses if you use Windows XP or Windows 7.