I have no experience with building laptops (and extensive experience with customizing desktops). I would have assumed there'd be soldering involved and other annoyances. Is that not the case?

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"Government big enough to supply everything you need is big enough to take everything you have... The course of history shows that as a government grows, liberty decreases."

-Thomas Jefferson

This computer is insanely powerful, and I didn't score anywhere near the benchmarks (of course, I have five open tabs, about six open applications, and am running multiple web and database servers on here to boot).

Still, it beat internet explorer running clean... lol.

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"Government big enough to supply everything you need is big enough to take everything you have... The course of history shows that as a government grows, liberty decreases."

-Thomas Jefferson

The laptop 'shell' I purchased had the motherboard and video cards pre-installed, requiring only the installation of CPU, RAM and hard drives, so I guess you could say it was more bare bones than building from scratch. Since it was intended to be put together at home, everything was pretty accessible and straightforward to put in. Putting the CPU in is done exactly the same as a desktop, as is the ram. The hard drive was the easiest, as you just pull a slot out of the side of the laptop, screw the hard drive onto the slot and then push it back in.

I'd imagine truly building a laptop from the ground up would be a much more difficult endeavor, but I haven't even found any place that sells simply the frame of a laptop (although, I haven't searched extensively or anything).

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“If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe.” - Carl Sagan

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I have, believe it or not, an old Osbourne, and I'd love to gut it, put in blazingly fast new stuff, just for kicks.

The only problem is that I don't know what I'd have to do to make a new motherboard fit, where I'd put (and, consequently, have access to) optical drives, what the hell I'd do with the dual 5 1/4" floppy drives slots and, the frosting on the cake, if it would all work with that awesome 5"x5" screen.

Still, I'd do it if I could address that stuff.

That'd be awesome and probably quite doable with a little cutting and refitting here and there. Although, yea, the screen would be a the biggest hurdle, I'd think.

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“If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe.” - Carl Sagan

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Yeah, it's just that everything's made for modern case standards (can't remember the name for that just now, but you know what I'm talking about) and any sort of serious graphics on that little screen? Plus, it's been so long since I've fired it up, I can't remember if it's a green screen or not.

On the plus side, the opticals could be made to fit behind the floppy slots, and may the DVDs could just slide in there.

It would be great, the first time I took it anywhere and people saw that happening.

Yea, I think it is green screen, which would probably create quite an issue. I'd probably have to see if there was a screen of equivalent size that could handle a modern graphics card.

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“If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe.” - Carl Sagan

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Still, a daunting but worthwhile challenge for all nascent retro comptech geeks.

Now you've got me thinking about it and wondering....

LOL...

Osborne 1 - Resurrection - TBCS Community Forums

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“If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe.” - Carl Sagan

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Fucking awesome, and bookmarked.

Great minds, etcetera etcetera.....

That is impressive.
Your old laptop has a DirectX 9 graphics processor? I noticed that requirement when I was thinking about loading it on one of my PCs.

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The most important political office is that of the private citizen.
Justice Louis D Brandeis

I've wondered the same thing. Especailly with as clean and powerful as VMWare has become. Redundancy is a piece of cake when you make the server virtual and the efficiency of the virtual environment helps alot with the cost of processors and memory.

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The most important political office is that of the private citizen.
Justice Louis D Brandeis

Radeon x1400.

It gets even better. I installed windows 7 on a 6 year old Toshiba laptop last night. i upgraded the ram to 2GB and its running a p4 3.0ghz. It got everything done in ~15 minutes as well except the geforce go5700 GPU. I went over to the the Toshiba site and all they had was a windows 2000/XP video driver (nvidia.com did not have a driver at all for it.) I said what the hell and installed it. To my surprise it works just fine (so far...).

Andrew

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“...corporations and those who run them cannot stop exploiting resources and amassing wealth until they have... .I cannot finish this sentence, because the truth is that can never stop; like cancer, they can only continue to expand until they kill the host.”

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