Build your own laptop

Posted at: Tuesday 1st August 2006 by James Morris

James Morris shows you how to custom-build your own performance laptop without spending a fortune

We don't recommend cutting too many corners on the RAM though. Although you could save a few quid by opting for 256MB instead of 512MB, you'd probably only reduce the price by £10-15. This is hardly worth the hit in performance and responsiveness that you'd experience, so we kept 512MB of RAM as the bare minimum, using one DIMM to leave room for a future upgrade, especially as the Celeron M 340 has a 400MHz FSB, so it won't benefit from dual-channel memory. Hard disks vary in price a lot, though, so we opted for the cheapest model we could find - a 40GB Fujitsu MHS2040AT. Similarly, we opted for Sony's DW-Q520A, which provides dual-layer burning for just £46.35.

One item we didn't include in this specification was wireless networking. Although the MS-1022 is equipped with a Mini-PCI slot, the adaptor isn't supplied as standard. This is why our sub-£500 spec omits wireless networking, but you can get a basic 802.11g PC Card adaptor for under £15. In contrast, the cheapest adaptor we found for an internal Intel version was the 2200 802.11b/g Mini-PCI adaptor for £18.02 from Phase Logic (www.phaselogic.co.uk).

For our second laptop, we upgraded the MS-1022 with some superior components. First, we swapped the Celeron M for a Pentium M. Although the 2.26GHz Pentium M 780 is the flagship product, it's poor value at £458.19, so we chose the more reasonably priced 2GHz Pentium M 760 (£211.44). We then complemented this with a 1GB dual-channel PC2-4200 DDR2 memory kit from Crucial (www.crucial.com), swapped the hard disk for a much more substantial 120GB Western Digital Scorpio WD1200VE, and added the Intel 802.11b/g Mini-PCI wireless LAN adaptor too.

Meanwhile, for the gaming laptop, we chose a 2.2GHz Turion MT-40 - not the fastest around, but it offers 1MB of Level 2 cache and has a lower 25W TDP rating than its bigger brother. Comparatively, the faster ML-44 is £60 more expensive, and will reduce battery life for only a small increase in performance. We partnered our MT-40 with a full 2GB complement of PC3200 DDR RAM. As the MS-1039 comes with a DVD burner built in, the only component left to add with this chassis was the hard disk. We took the performance route here, as well, and went for the fastest laptop drive currently available - Hitachi's 7,200rpm 7K100.

Performance

Our budget Celeron M laptop was, not surprisingly, quite slow, achieving 0.5 overall in our Media Benchmarks. However, considering that the reference score of 1.0 comes from a dual-core Pentium D running at 2.8GHz, we can safely say that for everyday web browsing, word processing and email, this laptop's performance would be perfectly adequate. The same would also be true of any cheaper Celeron M, so the sub-£500 specification will still fit the bill. However, gaming wasn't its strong point. This configuration was only up to playing Far Cry at 640 x 480 with no anti-aliasing or anisotropic filtering. This means you could probably get away with a less fps-sensitive RTS game, but you won't want to take this specification to your next LAN event.