Building HTPC out of laptop components

[sud98]

I have a four years old Dell Studio 1550 laptop which has an i3 chip. It has been giving some display problems with the culprit being shortcircuiting at the mother board level.

Does it make sense to repair it by reballing it, or replace the motherboard, or lastly can I farm the components like the CPU and build my HTPC?

Reballing costs around 3500 and its happened the second time in 6 months, a new mother board costs around 10k.

Any ideas welcome?

 

[manniraj]

Looks like theoretically it is possible but practically complex and difficult to make a HTPC out of Laptop components. I think the main issue will be with respect to the display and the case to hold all the components. But if your laptop has a in-built HDMI port I think it should work as you can get rid of the laptop screen connection. Do check out this informative thread of step by step instructions.

 

[sud98]

The HTPC will have its own case, not planning to use the laptop as one. Wondering if individual components like the

1. CPU i3 should be good enough for htpc
2. Motherboard, will need to be bought
3. Hard disk - should be re-usable
4. OS - Win 7 should be reusable
5. Slot disk drive - should be re-usable
6. GPU - would be added (although I guess its optional for now)

 

[manniraj]

The HTPC will have its own case, not planning to use the laptop as one. Wondering if individual components like the

1. CPU i3 should be good enough for htpc
2. Motherboard, will need to be bought
3. Hard disk - should be re-usable
4. OS - Win 7 should be reusable
5. Slot disk drive - should be re-usable
6. GPU - would be added (although I guess its optional for now)

My suggestions (though not 100% sure)
1. I think may be possible of using the i3 CPU (may not fit in the regular motherboard of a desktop)
2. Look at 1.
3. Yes reusable
4. No as the Win 7 OS licence key is linked to the motherboard you cannot reuse it with a different motherboard (you need to call the Microsoft helpline to get around this may be)
5. Yes reusable but you need a adapter to fit in a desktop
6. Yes with a desktop motherboard.

I think the link I provided you has the pros/cons as well as doable or not.

 

[haisaikat]

My opinion, spend 3500 to get it in working state and use as HTPC if it has HDMI or even VGA out and add remote, etc as required. Otherwise the processor cannot be used as is on a desktop motherboard since i3 for laptop and desktop are different (laptop ones are mobile series processors) and will end you buying a laptop mobo for desktop which is not desirable.

 

[sud98]

I have gone ahead and given it for reballing. If it fails again, I probably will need to trash the laptop.

The HDMI option is not very good as the audio seems restricted to 2 channel. I can get better quality using it as a dlna server.

I probably need a better spike buster as I believe thats the one causing this issue (although dont understand why should it matter for a laptop).

 

[haisaikat]

I had seen Dell laptops fail for earthing issues either with the main power or with the body, especially the rubber feets have worn out making the body toch the underlying table or whatever you have placed it on.

 

[sam9s]

You cannot use a laptop parts like GPU, CPU seperately as most of the components are embeded. All you can seperate from a laptop is RAM and HDD. However yes it can be used as a generic webserver, a file server, a linux distro, any distro, a low cost, low profile esxi server for running VMs (if the laptop atleast supports 8GB ram) or virtually any server that can run headless. A low cos NAS comes in to my mind with AMAHI (which runs headless).

For the record, the radio services Sam9sRadiO that I am running is been created on my 2 years laptop, whose screen broke completely while I was travelling....