Bastardizing a Toshiba Protege R500

[electroshift]

I've been an avid Toshiba Portege R500 and R600 owner for many years and recently picked up a used R500 on eBay. Taking a look at its guts, I noticed it has lots room to spare. The motherboard is smaller than I anticipated and the lack of an optical drive leaves a large portion of its belly unoccupied.

This extra space and the fact that its motherboard doesn't allow for any decent upgrades made me wonder if it would be possible to replace the board and its parts with something more modern, that would allow for copious amounts of RAM (comparatively, of course). This is for development, so the more memory the better.

The reason I like these laptops is their form factor: small, very compact keyboard and great monitor. I've looked all over and haven't found a still-in-production replacement. Any suggestions would be more than welcomed.

Thanks !

 

[jaguarskx]

Laptop motherboards (mobo) are not like desktop motherboards. They are designed specifically to fit in a particular chassis. You cannot fit a Dell mobo into a Toshiba laptop. You cannot even use a Toshiba mobo designed for a different Toshiba laptop model.

Laptops are not made to be upgraded beyond the RAM and hard drive / SSD. It was possible to perhaps upgrade the CPU in older laptops because they go into sockets; though many had CPUs soldered into the mobo. Nowadays, laptops have CPUs that are soldered into the mobo. The graphic chip is typically not upgradable because they are usually soldered into the mobo. Only specific gaming laptop models allow you to upgrade the graphics, but there are very few that allow you to do so and they typically cost at least $1,400. There even $2,500+ gaming laptops that do not allow you to upgrade the graphics.