Help Me Build a Laptop

[TheRealHanSolo]

So my roommate has an old HP Inspiron 5100 that she was going to throw away and well I need a laptop so I thought I would ask my techie friends here at DSA how I can use the shell of this to build a new laptop. I do not need any CD/DVD drives as I would mainly use this to play games from Steam so think similar to a netbook but just larger and with better quality hardware. Any advice you guys can give me would be greatly appreciated or videos on how to put everything together would be great too. I have taken a laptop apart before but never put one together.

(yes I realized too late which forum I put this in haha)

[l2ickeh]

I haven't been familiar with steam in a long time, being that just for gaming.. how old is it? What are the specs currently? Cheap route or moolah not an issue? Probably just up the RAM and I decent graphics card. I haven't built a computer since 2007, so my knowledge is a bit out dated,

[Cottoinc]

Alright I'm always up for a challenge. Lets start out verifying the model. There is no "HP" Inspiron 5100 but there is a Dell Inspiron 5100. Here are the specs for that model:
Processor Intel Pentium 4 2.4 GHz
Memory 384.0 MB
Hard Drive 40.0 GB
Operating System Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition
Display Type 14.1 in
Graphics Processor ATI MOBILITY RADEON 7500
Optical Drive CD-RW / DVD-ROM
Video Memory 16.0 MB

Does this look correct?

[RaTix]

Short answer.. There really isn't much you can do to upgrade a laptop. It is what it is. You can maybe put more RAM in it, but RAM is the one PC component that actually gets MORE expensive with age. So you might end up having to pay a couple hundred for just 2gb of RAM.

Use it as a shitty web browser net book type system, that's it.

[TheRealHanSolo]

It's a piece of crap yea but I was hoping to maybe completely gut it and rebuild the whole thing

[Cottoinc]

Yeah that is not going to happen. The best that can be done is more ram. You cant gut a laptop and replace it with new parts they are not made like that.

[RaTix]

Laptops are usually made to spec with specific boards. They aren't meant to be interchangeable with other parts like a tower PC is.
Even if you took it apart and bought a new mother board to throw in, chances are you will not get the ports and things to line up properly. The connections for the screens might also be different.

For the money you would spend on that anyway, you can get yourself a semi decent laptop. APU laptops are cheap alternatives to high end laptops with separate GFX cards. Check out the AMD A-Series laptops for good deals.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834312242

Of course, desktops you could probably get real decent gaming rig for the same amount you pay for low end laptop.

[hecx2370]

Yup. Even replacing broken parts on new laptop isn't feasible most times. It isn't worth the cost considering you can by a good laptop for $400-600 bucks. All with dual processor a good video card and a great deal of memory and storage.