I did something of the opposite: I used to have a big desktop. I got a laptop later so I could do stuff at coffee shops and elsewhere. But I eventually got ti

I did something of the opposite: I used to have a big desktop. I got a laptop later so I could do stuff at coffee shops and elsewhere. But I eventually got tired of the size and noise of the desktop (even though it was loaded with big, slow 120mm fans), and of the syncing issues with the laptop. I had wanted to build a quiet miniITX system, but finally gave up on that idea because of everything I've seen with "standard" ATX and ITX cases: they just are not engineered for quietness. The best you can do is go to water cooling, and I find it ridiculous that I'd have to go to those lengths for some quiet. So instead I've just gone the laptop route. I can buy a Dell enterprise-level Latitude laptop on Ebay for $150 easily, that's only a few years old, and it's portable and quiet and reliable. It even comes with a magnesium chassis. And if it breaks, I can buy a new one for $150 and resell the old broken one on Ebay to someone who wants the parts. These laptops are extremely ubiquitous (because they're used by so many businesses), so the parts are readily available if I want to just repair it, plus they're built to be fairly easily serviced (the older E6400 and E6410 had only one screw on the back panel). If you were buying consumer laptops, that was your problem: those things are crap and not made for easy servicing. You complain about "if the part had even been in stock": on my Dells, I can easily buy any part I want on Ebay: a new screen, a new motherboard, a new keyboard, a bare back panel, a speaker grill, anything. Everything is in stock. You don't need to build a laptop yourself to get decent repairability; you just need to get a decent laptop and not a consumer-grade POS. Then, so I can have a nice workstation, I got a docking station that supports dual DVI/DisplapyPort monitors, USB3, etc. These docking stations are standardized for Dell business laptops, so I can plug a huge range of them into it.