Hardware Diagnostics (Was: A talent for repair)

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Tue, Jul 27, 2010 at 07:40:04AM -0400, Fabio FZero wrote:
> Well, that's a bit relative. If you're talking notebooks, things have
> actually improved lately. It was almost impossible to do a simple
> memory or hard drive upgrade on a laptop 10-12 years ago. Right now,
> even Macbooks can be easily opened touching a few screws - and, yes,
> the newer models are getting progressively easier to service. Even the
> "non-replaceable" battery can be quite easily replaced!
> 
> The same holds true for Toshiba, Asus, Dell and most other brands I
> can remember. But I think I know what you mean: you want to replace
> video-cards, change processors or maybe even the motherboard. A few
> years ago I would agree that would be interesting, but with the huge
> offer of external everything (yes, even videocards) along with the
> fact that lately every new processor requires a different chipset, I
> doubt this would be really useful.
> 
> And let's not forget that the space inside notebooks is quite crammed.
> I find it incredible they are somewhat serviceable as it is right now.
> While it *is* possible to make the components even more accessible,
> this would certainly increase the size of the machines and probably
> sacrifice aesthetics (even if you don't mind this, lots of people do).
> 
> Having said that, I remember that Acer (or was it Asus?) released a
> "build your own laptop" kit a while ago. It was somewhat popular in
> Brazil. One could buy an "empty" notebook with keyboard, screen and
> motherboard to add the rest of the components manually. I'll try to
> find this to post here.

Asus still does I believe.

Unfortunate, other than cpu, ram, HD and sometimes the optical drive,
what choices do you have?  The screen is part of the kit, the motherboard,
chipset, video chip, pointing device, all ports, etc.  Maybe you get to
pick your own wifi card too, but really, what is the benefit?  I looked
at them before and really couldn't find a reason to bother.

-- 
Len Sorensen
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