commented out

It was a minor adventure, but the laptop is up and running happily. Having never cracked open a laptop before (at least not with the intentions of having it run flawlessly when I was done) I approached the project with a bit of trepidation. Luckily, it’s almost easier than building a desktop machine.

• Asus chassis with a 15.4″ SXGA screen
• Intel Pentium M clocked at 2.0ghz
• ATI Mobility Radeon 9700
• 60 gig IBM/Hitachi Travelstar 7200rpm hard drive.
• 1 gig of Mushkin 333mhz PC2700 RAM
• Interchangeable 24X/24X/8X/24X DVD+CD-RW Combo

The part list is basically the same as I posted earlier, but here are the details.

For the chassis I went with the Asus M6Ne. It’s around five and a half pounds, 1.1″ thin, and has a 15.4″ SXGA LCD screen. It’s versatile, with every feature I need. On the left side are the modem jack, RJ45 jack, 1394 port, Infrared port, PC card expansion slot, card-reader slot (which supports SD, MMC, and various Memory Sticks) and the controls for the slick Audio DJ feature. Audio DJ can be used to play music CDs without booting the machine. Combine this with the decent speaker set the laptop already has, or the audio out jack, and you’ve got a pretty good portable music system. The back has the DC power jack, parallel port, monitor port, TV-out port, expansion port (which is useful for docking), and four USB 2.0 ports. The right side is where the optical drive slides in.

To actually get to the guts of the thing, I had to remove the keyboard, which was a trial thanks to three little clips above several keys that hold it in place. This allowed access to the RAM slot and wireless card slot. To get to the processor, I had to remove the strip with the power button and shortcut buttons, which required me to flex the plastic a bit, and I was terrified of snapping it. I managed to remove it without disaster and had a fairly easy time moving the heat pipe to install the processor. Here’s a pic after the RAM and processor have been installed. You can see the RAM right there above the keyboard ribbon cable, and the CPU socket is above that and a little to the right. If I had opted for an internal wireless card (which I still might), that would have gone in a slot under that black plate in the upper left. Of course, while installing the processor I managed to drop a screw while reattaching the heat pipe. Now, if I had dropped it on the floor I could have replaced it, but of course I had to drop it inside the laptop. Panic settled in shortly and expletives were fired rapidly. After a minor conniption, I found the screw nestled inside the cooling fan. This is why I keep a pair of tweezers among my tools, for hideously tiny screws that leap from my grasp. Luckily, this was the only disaster.

Now that the hard part was over, I replaced the button strip and the keyboard and flipped the laptop over to access the hard drive compartment which I’ve denoted with a stylish red arrow. Simply slide the hard drive into the included bracket, secure it with screws, slide it into the hard drive compartment, and replace the cover. Above the hard drive compartment and to the left is another slot for more RAM, and along the bottom is where the battery goes. The CD drive slid neatly into the socket, following which came the usual Windows install and whatnot.

So, how does it perform? It runs Half-Life 2 just peachy, although the touch pad is far from suitable for shooters. The screen is crisp and clear, perfect for PhotoShop work, and the DVD performance is flawless. What about power consumption? There’s a feature called Power4 Gear+ which automatically adjusts processor speeds and such based on performance needs. Combine this with a secondary battery and you’ve got around nine hours of continuous use. I was a little afraid this wouldn’t work quite as planned and I’d get screwed out of maximum performance when doing something resource intensive, but performance has been excellent. Also, Asus was kind enough to bundle their video editing software, DVD player software, slide show software, and a copy of Nero. I haven’t tried burning anything yet, but I expect it to be acceptible. To top it all off, I got a free carrying case with it that isn’t nearly as cheap-ass as I figured it would be. In fact, it’s a good all around case that I’ll actually be using.

There you have it, custom laptop work. Finding a quality chassis is much easier than trying to find completely bare parts and building the entire thing from scratch, and you can still rest assured that you know exactly what you’re dealing with and what software is installed.