Headless Laptop?
After getting more and more frustrated with TiVo’s increasing ventures into DRM, I’ve decided I want to build a MythTV box. However, I don’t want it taking up a lot of space in my entertainment center area. Anything Mini ATX, including those “cube” cases, are still too big and ugly.
So what I want is a laptop-sized PC without the LCD, keyboard, touchpad and mouse buttons. I want a small, headless, commodity-parts PC. Basically, I want a Mac Mini but with commodity parts. Laptops are really small, but confine you to 2.5in HDDs and mini PCI cards, but that’s OK for me with the sizes of 2.5in drives > 100GB now. I want to drop a nice cool, quiet Pentium M chip in there with a snappy ATI Mobility video card and leave it on all the time. I’d probably have to use a USB DVR card, unless this mini PCI card will work. I looked at assembling my own laptop from commodity parts, but all of the laptop “cases” come with integrated LCD, keyboard, etc.
So my question is then does anybody know of any manufacturer that builds something of a headless laptop “case” without the LCD, keyboard, and mousing controls? I’ve looked around and haven’t found any such thing yet. Perhaps I should just buy a Mac mini, install Linux on it, though I’m not sure if MythTV will run on PowerPC.
Have you considered a Shuttle SFF case? One of these or these? I built one of the SK43Gs with an Athlon for under $400 a year ago as a machine for my kids (running Ubuntu Linux right now). Very small and quiet.
Comment by john — September 20, 2005 @ 11:09 am
I think I found what I might get…
Comment by scott — September 29, 2005 @ 4:53 pm