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Introduction:

My girlfriend (soon to be wife!) is going back to school to study to be a Veterinary Technician and we decided that this time around, a laptop would greatly help with note taking and other classwork. We explored the options of an old used laptop, a new one from a large laptop maker and I was of course interested in building my own. I had only recently read that this was even possible, assuming previously that laptops were only available from large suppliers. This is far from the truth in fact, but in my exploration I found that they were hard to find and harder to find reviewed.

The first order of business was deciding what was most important about the laptop. To me, I consider battery life and portability the key requirements for a laptop. This is definitely not everyone’s requirement, so I think you always need to think of your requirements before you even start looking. This laptop will mainly be running a simple word processor and web browser. Occasionally, some light photo-shop work might occur as well. It certainly won’t be primarily used for gaming, but I can’t say that won’t ever occur, simply that it wasn’t even a consideration in the features and specifications. It will certainly see some non-school usage, perhaps as a DVD player or photo viewing/editing tool when going out of town.

So with battery life and portability in mind, I settled on something in the 12″-14″ range. I have no strong preference for wide-screen vs. full-screen in a laptop, though it is my personal opinion that full-screen is much better oriented for text processing tasks such as web browsing and word processing. It is my opinion that a 12″ full-screen or 13″-14″ wide-screen would fit the bill perfectly. I am also a fan of AMD, though I am no rabid fan that cannot see when an Intel CPU might be a better choice. Until very recently, an Intel Pentium M CPU was the only contestant in long battery life computers. Fortunately for me, I found that fairly recently AMD released a line of power conscious CPUs called the Turion. Being a cheap bastard, I settled on the lowest speed/power usage Turion available, the MT-30. At this point I set out to find… that the number of white box laptops for this system was very limited.

MSI MS-1013

The MSI MS-1013 is an AMD based laptop with an ATI chipset. It has video, wired network and modem built in. It has 1 PCMCIA slot, 3 USB ports and a VGA port. Nero InfoTool says the DVD writer supports CD-R, CD-RW, DVD-R, DVD-RW, DVD+R, DVD+RW and DVD+R DL, So all it lacks is support to write DVD-R DL. It has a miniPCI and two DDR slots inside along with a 754 socket. The screen is 12″ with a native resolution of 1280×800. It can take a large 8 cell battery (which is what mine came with) or a smaller 4 cell battery from what I have read. I ordered a Turion MT-30 CPU, 1G of DDR RAM, 40G 4500RPM HD and the MSI BT+WLAN miniPCI card to put in it. In retrospect, I would have gone for a 5400 or 7200 rpm hd, aparantly the power usage is virtually identical. My goal was reduced power usage, but aparantly all I really got was reduced performance.

Disassembly

Taking apart a laptop is quite a bit harder than taking apart a desktop. With the MS-1013, you should start by removing the battery and then all 9 little black screws from the bottom. This will let you slide the DVD writer out, which may or may not matter in the long run. You will then want to pop out the dummy PCMCIA card so it doesn’t snag anything. Next, a thin (and hopefully dull) item is used to carefully pry at the front lip of the laptop, right below the LED/Touch-Pad. As you carefully separate it from the laptop, you can fold it forward and see the small ribbon cable that attaches the electronics to the motherboard. You can use your fingernail or a small screwdriver to loosen the special clip, just get under a lip and raise the plastic a little on both sides. The tiny ribbon cable should just slip right out.

With that removed, you can see where the PCMCIA slot, miniPCI slot and HD slot are. There will probably be nothing there, but who knows. The clips for the miniPCI slot are pretty obvious, but the HD cage has one small screw near the outside of the laptop to hold it in place. Now you will be removing the keyboard and its ribbon cable. It is simply held down by catches, carefully bending the keyboard slightly will allow it to come free quite easily. Notice another slightly bigger ribbon cable that you will want to loosen the catch on and slip free.

Once you have the keyboard out, you will be removing 5-8 screws. It will be 5 if the heat-sink is not in place yet, there are 3 screws that anchor into the heat-sink. You’ll need to use your dull, thin item to pry at the edge of the keyboard tray to loosen it up. Then you will need to flip the laptop around and use something to pop out the three catches that are behind the battery if it were installed. It might take a little bit more pressure than anything else yet to pop this portion off. There is another small wire and connector, for the power button and LEDs. Just pull it up and out, there are no tricky catches. Now you will see the CPU and RAM sockets, though you might have noticed the shiny metal paper/tape stuff covering the RAM sockets already.

When you install the CPU and heat-sink, be careful about tightening the screws. I would suggest a cross pattern in tightening (like a car wheel) and stop as soon as the screws stop turning. The springs should put plenty of pressure on the CPU die. You’ll want to install the RAM and then start putting things back together.

At this stage, I would suggest hooking up the power button and turning it on. The monitor should work and the CPU fan should come on after 30-60 seconds. Mine doesn’t turn on until the LCD has been showing a picture for a few seconds! The first time, I freaked out and turned it off before the fan was going because I was scared. The second time, I held my finger on the heat-sink to make sure it was getting warmer. Eventually the fan started going. Put something together, then test it again. Keep going like this until you are done and it is working. I say this because I put it all together thinking I couldn’t have done anything wrong. Well, it didn’t work and when i took it apart down to the CPU it worked fine. I slowly built up and it all worked. I screwed it back together and it didn’t work again! Finally, I figured out that the small metal tab from the RAM cover was contacting some parts of the motherboard and so I folded it the other way instead.

If you got the BT+WLAN card, it isn’t exactly obvious which antenna leads to hook to what. The single one is blue-tooth and should go to the lonely plug on the miniPCI card. The other two wires are WLAN, but they go to the same type of object on both ends so its okay to just hook these two wires up which ever way is more comfortable for the wires. The hard drive bay has a little pin angle changer that screws into the metal cage along with the drive. The cage itself is held to the laptop by a single small screw initially, but the bottom screws will secure it in place.

Thoughts

There are some problems with this laptop and the MSI WLAN+BT card. I have been unable to actually boot XP after installing the WLAN drivers. It just keeps looping around in the standard XP boot screen. It never stops with the little progress bar, but it never actually boots either. And I let it sit for 30 minutes once, when the normal boot time is something like 20 seconds. Another gripe I have is that the touch-pad is NOT wide-screen. Thats dumb! Wide-screen should have a wide-screen touch-pad, it only makes sense. Also, I miss my scroll wheel, but thats not their fault I suppose. Other than that, it is a very hoss lappy.

Update!

After weeks and weeks of procrastination and laziness, I finally sent my BT+WLAN card to MSI. They shipped me a replacement and it arrived today, not the same type of card but similar. I installed it and everything is working great. The wireless light has 2 different colors, blue and green. Blue is for wireless, green for blue-tooth and green and blue on is for both. Of course, the green and blue looks *almost* identical to the blue… but it works, so I am happy as a clam.