I haven't done that yet, but I have an old Asus eee lying around, which I might take apart and mess around with.

If you can swap parts, you may be able to "build" a new laptop by replacing ram, HD, and cpu. SSDs do wonders (assuming your mobo supports it)

I second this approach. Instead of building a laptop from scratch, try rebuilding existing laptops. Start with minor upgrades and repairs. Work your way towards major ones, and eventually do a complete tear-down and rebuild.

I suspect this is the way car mechanics learn. There are some further similarities. Like cars, and unlike desktop computers, laptops are heavily constrained by portable form factor concerns (size, thinness, total weight, efficient and safe cooling, low power usage, ruggedness). This wider variety of problems leads to a wider variety of solutions. So like cars, the guts of a laptop can differ wildly, and for learning you're best off picking a "line" that's well-engineered and has been relatively stable over time.

I've been slowly working towards laptop building via re-building existing laptops. Specifically, old IBM T4x Thinkpads, which you can pick up for about $200 these days [1]. There's a wealth of information about how to take them apart and mess with things [2], the user disassembly manuals are excellent [3], and I believe even the more recent T2xx Lenovo line is still pretty similar in terms of components and how they all fit together.

[1] http://www.iobound.net/laptop-prices/

[2] http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/ThinkWiki

[3] http://download.lenovo.com/ibmdl/pub/pc/pccbbs/mobiles_pdf/3...

Thanks a lot. That's a really interesting way to go about it, which I hadn't considered very seriously. I will go buy some Thinkpads. I might also experiment with Dell. I've had an inspiron for a few years and like it.

The trouble is that the eee is too small for any real work. I want a full size laptop (at least 13"). I'm just amazed at the contrast between building a laptop and a desktop. People have been building desktops for years, but there just isn't a culture of building laptops from scratch!