The idea of building your own netbook may sound like too much of an adventure for most, but for the bold Do-It-Yourself-er it’s a great opportunity to save big and get a custom computer.

Newegg.com is selling the Zotac barebone netbook kit for $149 after mail in rebate.  This will give you a 10.1 inch screen, 3 cell battery, and the ability to add whatever memory, operating system, and hard drive you want in order to make it yours.

At $149, you have lots of room to add without it coming close to the price of other netbooks commercially available today.

First you want to consider what kind of hard drive you want to use.  The standard size in many netbooks is only 160GB.  For $55, you can actually put in a 320GB hard drive.  If you crave speed you can get a 160GB 7,200 RPM drive for $59.99.

Next you have to get RAM.  Thankfully throwing 2GB into this kit will only cost you $42.  Most netbooks only come with 1GB of RAM so you’re ahead of the game with this kind of upgrade.

Once you add the hard drive and the memory you’re out of pocket $246.  If you opt for the faster 160GB hard drive you’re up to $251.  This may not sound like that much of a value over what you might be able to get in a store but when you buy a netbook in a store it’s going to come with 1GB of RAM, so you’d likely have to pay the $42 to go up to 2GB at some point in the future anyway.  The same goes with the hard drive.  Configuring it yourself would get you about $330 worth of netbook for under $250.

I didn’t mention anything about the operating system because there are tons of options if you don’t want to pay for a Windows license.  Once again, doing all of this work is only for people with patience, computer know-how and a desire to get a great value.  Don’t feel bad if this isn’t you, but I’d hate to see someone try to do all this work when it might be better for them to just spend the extra money and upgrade as they go.

Products mentioned:

- Zotac netbook barebone kit – $149
- 320 GB 5400 RPM SATA netbook hard drive – $55
- 160 GB 7200 RPM SATA netbook hard drive – $60
- 2GB DDR2 netbook RAM – $36

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