good online place for building laptops?

i've been trying to find somewhere to build my laptop for a few days now unsuccessfully. Every damn place is trying to ship WinBlows XP, and the few that i found that dont ship WinBlows are actually charging $50 for Linux installed. I want to be able to pick the following:

• hard drive size/rpm speed
• processor type/speed
• ram type/amount
• NO OS OR SOFTWARE INSTALLED
• cd/dvd drive speed/type

-has anyone built a laptop online recently? do you have any good sites? if i have to listen to one more salesperson say "well we get such a great deal on windows" im going to pull my hair out

Can't you just remove Windows and put on whichever OS you want?

well obviously yes, but i'm sure it costs less w/o an OS installed in the first place. i finally found somewhere that almost has what i want, www.googlegear.com . still looking for others though.

try dell . You can customize online and then call them to add and delete items (or at least with a corporate account you can) so i assume you can do it with other accounts too

Heh, I'm pretty sure this notebook doesn't come with Windows XP.

*ducks*

Not what you're looking for, eh? It is a pretty sweet rig though...

I never really thought about it, but people don't usually build their own notebooks, so I'm not sure how you'd go about getting a notebook with a clean hard drive. I guess part of the problem is the notebooks are so integrated, and many parts of them require software to run, that it is impossible to ship out a working notebook without an OS on it. And frankly, the market for non Windows notebooks (except macs) is pretty minimal, so most companies probably don't bother.

Good luck with your search. If you find anything else

hmmm, pay my college tuition for a year or buy an iBook? hehe, but that really is a nice comp. if i had the cash i would love to get one of those. i have managed to find a place that ships w/o an OS, but they dont offer any upgrades, its a "package deal"!!! LOL i cant win!! i had no idea this was such a complex task. :shakes fist: guess i'll keep looking

rkelley<<nope dell refuses to sell w/o an OS installed. the guy i talked to on the phone says, "you don't run Windows? [i] then what do you run[i]?" -as if there was no other OS around. i said "freeBSD" and then there was this long uncomfortable silence and i said thanks and hung up