Barebone Laptops are becoming much more popular lately. Especially with the LAN Gaming crowd.
A barebones laptop typically comes without a Hard Disk Drive, WLAN card, Memory, or OS. Sometimes the Optical drive is ommitted as well.
Most of the laptops sold, regardless of brand labels, are manufactured by a handfull of companies: MSI (the motherboard manufacturer), ACER (3rd largest manufacturer), ASUS, and Compal (who?).
However, resellers rather than retail customers are the primary market. Many of the laptops that are available from computer customizers are just this kind of re-branded machine.
There are a handfull of retailers that are beginning to offer these machines to regular users too. A quick web search for "Barebone Laptops" ought to give you an adequate number of hits.
Prices range from $400 for the low-end machines with integrated chipset graphics (mostly Intel), to over $2000 for those with discrete graphics cards (nVidia/ATI), dual hard disk or optical drives, and other options like Bluetooth and built-in TV Tuners.
To get the best prices on the other components (HDD, Memory, etc.), I reccommend thast you not buy them from the same site as the barebones chasis, as they tend to price these components higher than market price to make up their profit. Instead, I recommend that you purchase those components from standard internet computer retailers like NewEgg and others.
CptA
