The ultimate Laptop!

[jecook]

Post your horror stories and your "holy crap! It's still working!" laptop stories here.

Seriously, I want to hear the best and worst.

My worst: I had to deal with an averatec POS laptop that pretty much had every componant go bad in the 18 months that the owner had it. Combined with their craptastic warrenty policies, and I won't touch one with a 30 metre pole.

My best: a Thinkpad 600 I named Snoopy. It logged probably a million frequent flyer miles between the two people that had it. It finally died from a bad heat sink fan.

Comments

[compwizrd.livejournal.com]

My brothers unknown name pentium1-mumble laptop cost him a fortune, and had a bad L2 cache. The company refused to fix it.

We ended up using it for programming PLC's and Robots, until it died of user percussive maintenance.

Our Thinkpad T42/43's are averaging a month or so until the fingerprint scanners die. I've stopped configuring them so that the users won't notice.

My thinkpad T23 is still going just fine.

[arkady.livejournal.com]

My best was a ThinkPad A30 named servalan that did duty as household server for over a year, running 24/7 - on WinXP Pro, yet! It was finally laid to rest when the hard drive controller packed up, but before that it gave me a good 4 years of service.

Now I'm onto servalan mk II - a ThinkPad T23 running Ubuntu. She doesn't have to do server duty, thank goodness!

[guinevere33.livejournal.com]

My old Dell Inspiron 8000, Artemis, was cursed. First of all, I should tell you that it shipped with WindowsMe, and things only got more fun from there. The very first time I used the CD-RW - just to play a CD, mind you, not even burn one - it blew a circuit and died. (It took 4 months of phone calls and eventually angry letters to get a replacement sent. Thanks, Dell.) Then there was the issue with AOL. One day when I signed off, AOL decided to download a whole crapload of new drivers (as it occasionally does) - and in the middle, my system locked up for unrelated reasons. Somehow, this got my modem stuck in "attempting to dial a connection" mode. 10 tech-support phone calls and TWO complete Windows reinstalls were required to fix it. A year later, the keyboard bit the big one after only 3 months of constant use (I used an external keyboard the rest of the time), and was replaced under warranty. 4 months later, I woke up to find the battery totally, inexplicably dead, fortunately also under warranty. The replacement I was sent lasted a whole 13 months before dying in an identical manner.

I have sworn many vows to never buy a Dell laptop again, and to do everything in my power to avoid calling their tech support and sitting on hold for any more hours of my life. I bought a MacBook Pro.

[zhent.livejournal.com]

My daughter is using an old Dell Latitude CPx that's been in service for six years now. We've gone through three keyboards and two motherboards in that time, but it's still running strong...

[altorogue.livejournal.com]

My roommate's computer, Lou (short for Loopy mk 2. Yes, there was a previous laptop of Hell, but I didn't have to deal with that one.)

Lou just fell apart. Keys would come off the keyboard, and that was the one thing that Dell somehow never even tried to fix. Her A drive would constantly fall out, so that she eventually was using duct tape to hold it in. She'd have it on her lap and would shift a tad . . and the A drive would fall out. Her power cord broke, they sent her a new faulty one that looked like it had just been soldered together and didn't have tape over the join. And then they sent her another new one that finally worked. And it also liked to freze, especially when using the magnifier (my roommate has horrible vision, so she needs large print).

I would call Dell for her, as I knew more of what I was talking about. They'd send a repair tech . . . and then the repair tech would be trying to repair the drive, etc (a futile gesture). They'd take it apart, put it back together- and it would still not work. She had a Dell tech come about every two weeks for awhile there.

The last straw was a year ago, and the hard drive itself finally died. Of course, it was right before the end of the semester, so she lost a few final projects . . . . Her parents had bought the extended service warranty, yadda yadda, because they'd had so many problems. Her mom had to bitch at Dell for a week before they finally gave her a brand new computer to replace the paperweight the other one had become (it was two and a half years old)

The new one, Ziggy? Two keys have already come off, including the left control key that won't work. And it overheats constantly.

I give up. Our college has had horrid issues with Dell in general these last few years. I want a laptop- I'm getting a macbook.

[jecook]

Just out of curiosity, how well do those fingerprint scanners work in the real world?

my last place bought a bunch of R52s with them, but we left them turned off in the software image because we were not ready to do anything with them at that point.

[bdinger.livejournal.com]

I'm a hardware junkie, yet I've had my 500mhz "rev 2" iBook for.. five years now? Something insane like that. It just, never pisses me off. It's a tad slow, but I use it for xterms, broswer, and iChat. Works great.. eventually I might upgrade. I thought I had finally talked myself into a MacBook, but those new iMacs..

Where I work, we have people that KILL laptops. When I started we had these horrid Gateway shitboxes. I'd have at least one in my office at any given time with any given problem. Finally they got smart and we bought a bunch of IBM R32's.

I saw one bounce off the roof of a car onto pavement when the user forgot to put it inside. The screen hinges are now broke, and the DVD drive had to be replaced - but other than that it's fine. I've seen at least one that has been sat on, without any problems. They are freaking tanks, and even if they are getting dated I think we're going to keep them for a long, long time.

[compwizrd.livejournal.com]

well, until they break, they work nicely.. i had them setup to use the fingerprint for the power on password, and then it logs itself into windows from there too

i think we were just scratching them up, one of the ones that died has been dropped repeatedly, the bottom of the laptop looks like someone belt sanded it from all the scratches.

[mawz.livejournal.com]

My PowerBook 170 still works like a charm, other than the dead battery (understandable in a 15 year old laptop). The PowerBook 190cs I use as a terminal for my SGI Challenge S is also soldiering on apart from dead abttery issues (neither is ever used off AC, so batteries are irrelevant).

My ThinkPad G40 on the other hand... In the first year the CD-ROM and VGA out died (the former got fixed under warranty) and the system killed off it's own restore partition. Also the PC Card slot is rather flaky and the Battery was only good for 45 minutes when new (desktop CPU, Ugh). But it still makes a decent portable Ubuntu desktop (bloody thing weighs 10lbs with the AC Adaptor that's oh so necessary.

[jarad.livejournal.com]

On the downside: A toshiba laptop that just had everything go wrong with it. When it finally stopped working, it was taken for repair, with the outcome being that it had apparently fried every component on the board.

On the upside: A generic no-name laptop (Advent in the UK, they buy in cheap stuff and rebrand it) 500Mhz Celeron with 128Mb of RAM. To this day, it still gets occasional use a portable network sniffer.

[kait-the-great.livejournal.com]

This is tamer, but...

A co-worker spilled water - like, a cup full - all over her desk including her open and powered-on laptop. Then she decided her keyboard had removable keys and started taking them off to dry underneath. SNAP. SNAP SNAP. SNAP. Umm, says I, I don't think you should be doing that. SNAP. SNAP.

Anyway, all the keys except K dried out, and between the two of us we were able to reassemble the keyboard minus two buttons (I think the function and the windows keys) which actually had damaged parts from the disassembly. The laptop was fine except for that.

The last problem was, she had a K in her login password. One keyboard shortcut to the on-screen keyboard later and that was fixed.

[torkell]

An ancient (circa 1995) Fijitsu laptop (P233, 96MB ram, 3GB disk), with a hard disk whine that goes right through you. Has had two replacement batteries, and still works (and still holds a decent charge). They don't make 'em like they used to.

My school got a bunch of Acer laptops a few years back, and they're suprisingly indestructible. One was open and running, and got knocked from desk height to the floor, bouncing off the UPS on the way down. We picked it up and kept using it - the only damage was to one of the catches.

A friend's Toshiba, from a couple of years back. About half a year ago he passed it to me to look at something, and I noticed the screen was rather wobbly. "Ah yes, a screw dropped out the bottom a week ago - half the thread was sheared off". Actually, it was worse. A quick snap-snap of plastic catches and we flipped up the panel just forward of the screen to discover the screen was being held in by one screw and two cables, the rest of the metal having physically broken off (the structure is one screw going up into each hinge, and two going down just forward of the hinges on each side). Oops.

And then there's my Thinkpad. Been used heavily in the year or two I've had it, been dropped a couple of inches more than once (sometimes when on), knocked about in bags, and just generally *used*. Battery life is down to 2 hours (from 4.5), which is more than a friend's Toshiba of similar age had when new. IBM seriously know how to make laptops.

[the-s-guy.livejournal.com]

Foundation username (?... possibly) and Blakes 7 hostname.

<_<

>_>

♥!

[captpackrat.livejournal.com]

Worst laptop story: I bought a Toshiba 17" laptop, back when 17" was brand new. I utterly detest the default configurations that laptops come in, so I spent a couple days reinstalling Windows and Office and stuff (mostly stuff). When I finished, I opened the Event Viewer to make sure everything was working right. And then I saw it, disk read errors up the wazoo.

I called up Toshiba tech support and gave them the error message. They refused to help me because I wouldn't wipe the drive and reinstall Windows back to the factory condition. I tried to argue with them that it was a hardware error and no amount of Windows reinstalls would help, but no, I had to reinstall Windows before they'd even consider trying fixing the hardware.

So I just took the machine back to the store and exchanged it, and the new one had the same problem. I exchanged it again, and that one had the same problem. I checked the floor models and they had the exact same disk errors. I even tried different stores, and every single machine of the model had a drive problem.

Toshiba never would admit there was anything wrong, but that model disappeared just a couple months after it was released.

"It's still working?" story: Not exactly a laptop, but I broke a Motorola StarTac phone in half once. The top portion of the phone, which housed the battery and the speaker was totally gone. But I had a hands-free kit that could also provide power to the phone, so I tried plugging it in. Lo and behold, it actually powered up and I was able to make calls with it!

[blossomingfire.livejournal.com]

Dell Inspiron 1150 - "Matilda" - I bought it from Delloutlet.com, and apparently the previous owner had put a hex upon it.

3 week old lactose intolerant/reflux having son projectile vomited about 6 ounces of formula THROUGH THE AIR onto the laptop on the other side of me. Covered it. So I took it apart, cleaned it, it was dead. I let it dry out a couple of weeks, voila, working fabulously, except for the touchpad. No biggie, I'll just plug in a mouse.

Because I had a c-section and wasn't too inclined to move (and had since moved the makeshift table resulting in the barf bath) I'd sit it on the floor beside my recliner. One day I took a nap, and my klutz of a great dane somehow managed to push the laptop underneath my chair.

Yep, you guessed it. I woke up, put the foot down, CRAAAACK!

Okay. So I pulled off the LCD panel and hooked a monitor to it. No big deal....until I found out how much another LCD panel would cost. (Holy CRAP! Half the cost I paid for it!) The AC adapter died about a week later, and also shocked the crap out of me.

I managed to pull an adapter from a unit at work in order to get my files off, and resigned myself to using my desktop.

Matilda sits on the table beside me. I did perform an exorcism on her. If anyone would like a fixer upper, make me an offer. (P4 2.8ghz/512mbR/60ghd/wireless etc.) I'd suggest a new keyboard and touchpad too though.

That's really the only 'bad' Dell laptop I've ever had, and it's mostly my fault. I have an E1505 now, and go out of my way to make sure it stays out of harms way.

[kepplah.livejournal.com]

Can they be defeated using a photocopier, as a similar product was on Mythbusters?

[neferde.livejournal.com]

I have never heard anything good about Toshibas from my friends who have owned them. Everything from the touchpads going berserk, to ports going bad, to horrible out-of-the-box battery lives, to the most common problem of screens snapping or falling off due to weak (and usually plastic) hinges! They're usable... as long as they never get moved or unplugged.

My current laptop is an IBM Thinkpad 701C running Win 95 on 16 megs RAM and 75MHz. No battery life anymore, but it's been dropped and banged up and refuses to quit working! I really wouldn't mind a new Powerbook, but my Butterfly works quite well for what I need a laptop for right now. And I'll admit there's nothing like sitting down in a coffeehouse, cracking it open, and seeing heads turn!

[azurelunatic]

Large glass of water upended over powered-up and plugged-in laptop. Immediate panic, unplug, remove battery to the unsettling sight of the power LED fluttering off. Dry upended for three days. Still works.

Dell Inspiron 1000 with hard drive failure. Shipped off for replacement under warranty, returned 1 month later with a hard drive 25% smaller.

[azurelunatic]

Wow, that beats my 1 month 25% off hard drive BOfD incident!

[sacredlyprofane.livejournal.com]

A friend of mine had an Averatec, her CD rom failed. I switched it out with mine, it became obvious it was the controller on the motherboard, couldn't be seen in the BIOS etc.
Rang Averatec as it was still under warranty. Their answer? "Format the hard drive" With what?
When I finally got her to understand the problem, she told me she had no idea what Canadians needed to do to get parts replaced.
Awesome training Averatec.
On a side note, a friend of mine that worked at Best Buy told me that whenever they sold an Averatec, they'd bring two out, because guaranteed one would be DOA.

[compwizrd.livejournal.com]

i'd have to find a working on, and a bored user. I suspect it won't, as it's a bit picky in the first place... ii'm sure other methods would work, but my end users would protest at the "hey, lets see if your finger has to be warm, or have blood in it" methods.

Bestest Lappie EVAR!!!!!!!11!!!!ONETYELEVEN!!!1!!

[dreamatdrew]

Mjolnir, my original 300mhz iBook TOTALLY rocks. Considering that I didnt pay for him, at ALL, I got one hell of a bargain. Cosmetic damages, of course. He's been used and abused. Bezel on the CDROM is gone. The plastic at the hinge is half-broken. But he runs like a champ. Still gets ~ 2 hours of battery life, and thats with AirPort draining it like mad. The only thing actually BROKEN at this point is the keyboard. My ? and / keys have decided to no longer work. And that just started like a month ago. (Hooray for RapidoWrite to get around that.)

I love dis little guy... *glomps das ibook*