This is a good idea.

NICE JOB GUYS! I love it.
Which of course means it will never see the light of day, as nothing is proprietary.

Or you could just get a Mac. I\'ve taken apart dozens of laptops and recently had the pleasure of taking apart a couple of Macs. Refreshingly, they were held together with screws and made of aluminum instead of snapped together plastic. And, although the insides were a tight fit, there was nothing that couldn\'t be relatively easily replaced. The notable exception was the screen glass, which as the only think glued to the case.

If I had something like this I\'d upgrade or replace parts in it tell the chassis fell apart! :-)

Thanks for BETTER ideas....
If it\'s properly done, so that if dropped it won\'t go into a heap of bits, it will make for a practical PC.

Also most of the hype about the latest and greatest laptops - are either due to one of 2 things, higher specs or bigger screen.
Really while there is all the mega trend laptops, I for one would rather tend to forsake the latest and greatest for a damned good utility model. A model T of laptops so to speak.

This is a great concept and I would love to see it work - especially after trying to upgrade my laptop recently and finally deciding to just get a new one due t the difficulty migrating to a new hard drive. The problems tend to be software related. New OS, drivers, re-install, yada, yada. New components will have to have common driver structure which may limit long term upgrades. The OS and driver structure (and hardware interactions) that work today may not be supported three generations from now. This may or may no be a problem, I hope it is not.

Alternatively, I think the future is in extremely small computers with no keyboards and projected displays to greatly reduce the materials involved. Then the hardware required for an upgrade will be less than the size of the HDD in today\'s laptops.

There have been modular laptops before with end user upgradeable components. The problem has always been a lack of industry standards for how the bits plug together.
That\'s always limited the number and specifications of interchangeable components, all always only available from the laptop\'s OEM.
When the manufacturer moves on to a new model line, all new development for the old modular line stops.
If a group of companies would get together and create a universal central laptop bus module with ports for a CPU carrier, video board, RAM backplane, and a pair of SATA drive ports for hard and optical drives, plus a \'generic\' backplane port where modules supporting all the other typical ports (USB, eSATA, Firewire, ExpressCard) in any combination could be plugged in.
The next issue would be how the cases provide access to the ports. Molded holes that are part of the cases wouldn\'t do. They\'d have to use fixed dimension port plates similar to ATX desktop PCs.
Given such a \'dream platform\' for laptops, the only things that would differentiate them is what components are plugged together and some exterior styling. In the long run it would save OEMs money because the internal tooling design could be reused over and over, but profit margins would drop to the levels of most desktop PCs.
Given all that, I still don\'t see a huge jump in the number of people upgrading a laptop by swapping out components. Most desktop computer upgrades are still done by replacing the entire unit, especially after two years as technology advances make it more cost effective = more overall performance for less $ than upgrading major parts like the CPU and video board.

Thumbs Up, way to go. The more \"closed loop\" systems mankind puts in place, the healthier, more efficient and survivable the planet will be d;-)

Having written a long comment and then losing it due to time expiry I don\'t think I\'ll bother again..........who designs these sites? Ian Colley.