I thin IAN hit the Nail on the Head... You can get a decent Laptop from $500.00 to $750.00 and know what your getting... It's not worth the cost to spend more to get less...
With Laptops a huge problem is Batteries... I can tell you with a generic your screwed... When I worked at Walter Industries we ordered a Laptop that even got a write up in a PC Magazine... I never even heard of the Brand Before the Article... They gave it ranting reviews... I told my Boss I would rather spend the $75.00 difference and stick to Dell...
Well he goes yeah but we can get this one cheaper and with Another Battery...
Well he did not look at the whole picture... First nothing mentioned about product support and warranty...
Next not being a Major Name you have limited options...
We get the Laptop the shipping was not mentioned... $45.00 Next they supposedly ran out of the Lithium Batteries... So we only got the main Battery and the other was on back order...
2 Months later the main Battery starts to loose it's charge faster and faster... We call the Company and they were out of Business? Next we then call every Battery Place listed on the Web no one and I mean no one could match it... Batteries Plus especially... Next I kept calling over 38 places...
2 Places say well send us the Battery you have and we can rebuild it... $120.00 plus Shipping both ways... Also no promise on how long it will work... My Boss goes ahead an send it out... 3 Weeks pass no word we call them I get this guy on the phone ummmm we have a problem?
The problem is we could not get these Cells it uses anymore... Also we had to crack the Circuit for the Smart Circiut... This is the little lights telling you how much charge you have...
Then he says well we can send it back... So we now spent almost $160.00 trying to get the battery fixed... Now it's broke and it was taped back together...
We could not put it back in... I called the other place to rebuild it... The guy ask does it have a smart circuit yes it does... He goes quiet they comes back well it may not work after we rebuild it... I tell him what happened already.. Then he says oh BP could not rebuild it? No Sorry that is where we get our parts from...
Now about 6 weeks with this thing the Screen starts to cut out... Now we have to hook it up to a Monitor... Shortly later the Ac Adapter starts to go out...
I spent 4 more weeks trying to do something with this $1200.00 POS...
I finally found out it was made by Chinnon... Out of the Rep.of China... They me the unit was a limited run and no parts were left for it... How ever for $800.00 they would replace it with a newer model and eat the $400.00 difference for the problems we had with it...
Next day I ordered a Dell Inspiron...
So save your self grief get a Name Brand Laptop... It would be different it everything was a standard parts like a Desktop Clone... They are not and for this alone after that hassle I wouldn't bother with a DIY...
Bill Preece...
-----Original Message-----
>From: "Ian C. Blenke" <icblenke@nks.net>
>Sent: Jun 25, 2007 10:40 AM
>To: slug@nks.net
>Subject: Re: [SLUG] DIY laptop
>
>Eben King wrote:
>
>> Has anybody done the "build your own laptop" thing? What did you
>> think of the end result? Did the case seem of solid construction?
>> Was it intricate to (dis)assemble? How's the battery life?
>
>
>I bought an MSI-1013 chassis last year and tricked it out with
>components. The result was an overpriced laptop with whitebox
>performance, some serious IRQ issues, and a bunch of heat.
>
>The biggest pain was the MSI-1013's BIOS, which has a broken ACPI DST
>table, functionally crippling ACPI and causing much jumping through
>hoops to load an initrd based DST which still left me with a
>non-suspendable laptop (due to the ATI fglrx driver and various other
>chipset dependencies).
>
>The IRQ issues were horrible up until around 2.6.19, just before I moved
>to my macbook. With 2.6.20 kernels, it seems to hold together well
>enough now to run the fglrx driver without eating itself right away.
>
>The heat issues were solvable with a little heat-fan-tray thing, but
>made things a bit cumbersome.
>
>My suggestion to you is to focus on purchasing a laptop that you _know_
>will suspend cleanly with linux without too much effort to get it to
>that point. That usually means decent support for said hardware with
>your favorite linux distribution.
>
>Today, I'm using a core2-duo Macbook now, with OS/X, and I'm not looking
>back. Not that OS/X doesn't have its own flaws.
>
>At least it's not Vista.
>
> - Ian C. Blenke <icblenke@nks.net>
>
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