Excellent hack.

In case you’re a masochist like me and want a lot more work on your hands, then you could remove the whole laptop mobo and make its own case and make it more compact in the process.

I’ve done this recently to make a standalone machine out of a busted laptop. This can give you a single, more compact unit with all the parts inside. You can improve the cooling and noise too (by using desktop fans). You’ll maintain your laptop resale value too by not destroying the case and being able to put the mobo back in place in the future. Infact, with today’s ram prices, the reason I went down this route is because you can get broken laptops with soldered in DDR5 ram.