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Create an expandable laptop

410 points posted to New Product Ideas, Laptops by tnitchov 05/18/07

Create a laptop similar to my old Dell Inspiron 4150 with an expandable bay. It had 2 "drive bays" one of which was used for the battery. I could add a 2nd battery into the 2nd slot for additional runtime. I could even swap out a floppy, cdrom or DVD into that 2nd slot.

In addition, come out with adapters that fit in the slot but contain the following components :

- additional hard drives
- a media slot with IEEE1394
- a 2nd video card

Give the user the option to take out a DVD drive to decrease weight, but also the option to add features in the future.

Dell used to have it in older systems but stopped producing them. Now Lenovo has their Thinkpads equipped with the Ultrabay which "almost" does this.

skippydaroo
05/19/07		 It would be nice if you could expand or update other components as well, such as the graphics card and the cpu.
I do seem to recall nvidia I think it was did great a daighter card design of graphics card some time ago, would be nice to see it finally used.
Would also be nice if the cpu came on a daughter card package that you could upgrade when newer faster models come out
moiety
05/23/07		 You can put a second battery or, I believe, even another hard drive in the optical drive bay of the D series systems. It's just that it's a different shape from the main battery bay, unlike C series systems. There's not a filler or 'airbay' option like there used to be, but really, those drives don't weigh much.

I agree on a media slot being a great idea. For a 2nd video card though...it would almost certainly take some custom connector, and those things get hot! Would you want all that added heat coming up through the keyboard at you?
 
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