For general web surfing and email I have an older laptop with wireless which I use in the living room. For what it is, it works fine. But with a 300mhz cpu, streaming music or movies can be clunky. The 13 inch LCD (800x600) makes my eyes tired and always scrolling around is becoming a pain.
A friend of mine is getting rid of his micro-atx motherboard with cpu and memory. I decided I’d buy it from him.
I started thinking perhaps I could mount this little motherboard in something cool and build a homemade laptop to replace my living room, lounging computer.
Micro-atx boards are only 9.5 x 9.5 inches and only need about 3-4 inches in height for the CPU fan. The motherboard is self-contained with video, sound, network and all the extras. I have a little 2.5 inch 4 gig drive from an old laptop and a 15 inch LCD desktop monitor I’d be willing to alter or remove from its housing. For a computer like this I don’t think I’d need a CD-rom hooked to it all the time. I can use my USB cd-rom only when I need it.
I’ve got all the parts, now I just need something cool to mount it into.
My first thought was an aluminum briefcase like this one. There would be plenty of room for everything and it would have kind of a cool old school spy vs spy motif to it. But there has to be something better.
What do you guys think? What common (or uncommon) item might make for a good computer housing? I’d like it self-contained so it works like a laptop, but I’m open to ideas. It has to be portable enough to pass between my wife and myself on the couch.
Personally, if I had small enough ingredients, I’d probably build myself a NESpc. It’s a whole computer built inside of an original Nintendo. The CD/DVD drive opens out the slot on the front (where you put the games in), and some people wire up the controller ports into USB or Keyboard/Mouse PS/2 ports (heh, PS/2 on an NES…there’s irony). There are other pages out there on this concept too.
That would make a good housing, but there’s no place for the monitor.
Speaking of funky things to mount computers in, I always wanted to make the Bucket PC. I have an 8 inch colour CRT monitor which came from an old point of sale system. I thought about taking one of those 5 gallon white paint buckets and mounting the computer and 8 inch monitor inside the bucket. It would be like a super-sized Mac Plus.
How about an old Mac 128k, or an Apple II case? You might be able to find a small enough CRT or LCD screen to replace the original 9" screen. (You might get some more ideas from The Cult of Mac.)
After that…maybe you could mount it in a skull (fake, animal, human, or whatever)? The monitor and the keyboard would, of course, have to carried seperately, which might limit it as a laptop. The Bone Room would be the place to show for this kind of thing.
I think I’ve heard of humidors and military ammo boxes being used for custom cases.
