How it all started...

There I was happily using my HP dv1500 on my lap in my living room, when....pop.

The laptop died right there. No warning, no bsod, no ticking hard drive, just pop. I check the power and it is all connected to the wall, but no lights, nothing. So after a bit of head scratching it slowly dawns on me that my laptop is toast.

Whilst I use this laptop for work, I don't store anything major on it and therefore it is not a tradgedy in the "oh my god I wish I'd backed that up sort of sense". But it is a pain that I now have to share a laptop with my wife, until I can get it fixed.

So I needed a replacement, and started to look about on the net, but I had been running a Beta of Vista on my old laptop (which was working well) and wanted to run Vista on my new one. And more importantly I wanted to see the Aero interface on my new one. The old one didn't quite have it in the graphics department, so I needed a new laptop that had 128mb+ of graphics.

I couldn't find one except for real money.

Then I remembered reading in a copy of CustomPC magazine an article about building your own laptop, and slowly the pieces started to fit together. What if I took the pieces out of my old Laptop and put them in a new barebones laptop with better graphics. It all seemed so logical.

So I ripped the old one apart and ended up with a shoebox containing:

• Pentium M 1.7 (Dothan 533fsb 740)
• 1gb of 333 ram (will have to replace)
• 100gb Hard drive - Fujitsu mhu2100at
  
• Intel Wireless card - wm3b2200bg
• DVD / CD drive - gca-4080n
  

Now all I needed was to find someone in the UK that would sell me a barebones laptop.

This proved to be a difficult task. The article I read pointed me towards Savastore and EBuyer. I won't go into detail, but needless to say after trying both and actually ending up with a laptop from one of them (minus the keyboard) the whole process was a huge waste of time and energy. But not to be put off and having got my money back, I carried on looking.

My attention turned to overseas markets, in particular US and Canada as they almost speak the same language. I found one that appealed after some searching, Bytewize Computers in Ontario Canada. I selected an ASUS Z71v and went ahead. It cost me can$ 812.33 which translates to £395.15, this includes delivery....but not any tax, vat, or handling...gulp.

I am now waiting with baited breath for my delivery.