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Cracked Compaq Laptops?
gwn asks: "I have just over 100 Compaq Armada 100s laptop purchased early in 2001. Over 60 have developed cracks in the lid just above the left hinge and at the front corners. I had one of these on a VP''s desk, no abuse, and it cracked. Compaq has denied any other reports of this with any other customer, just my problem they say. They have stopped giving me a hard time when I send these in for repair and they are repairing for free. This is still a royal pain in the rear and does cost me money. Lately, they started coming back with Compaq Notebook 100 labeled screens and it got me thinking they are running out of parts. It can't just be mine that are cracking. Does anyone else have a Compaq Armada 100s or Notebook 100 with cracking case problems?"
Stop hitting them with a hammer.
That would probably help.
Al Qaeda has ninjas!
I have a second hand Armada 7800 series (7380DMT), And it' been remarkably solid for the amount of abuse I've put it through. I'd venture a guess and say that the models you're dealing with probably has the problem that many Vaios have where the screen hinge and other high-stress points are not reinforced with metal/enough metal.
My Armada, circa 1999, has only had issues with the rubber feet coming off (the glue is worthless) and the doors on PC Card slots breaking (broke within a week of my buying it, later last summer).
Hilary Rosen's speech was about her love of money and her desire to roll around naked in a pile of money.
I had a Dell Inspiron 7500 for a couple years. Not only did the lid plastic crack in several places, but the hinges holding the entire LCD simply broke, three times. Dell finally got so sick of fixing my laptop they sent me a 8100 instead, which will be going back to them shortly, again, to fix a broken LCD connection that causes the screen to flash mostly green, but recently blue and red as well.
Unfortunately, the ability of a laptop to hold up to even normal use doesn't seem to be a feature that is ever dealt with in reviews, making it very hard to determine which brand or laptop to get without significant word-of-mouth data.
GStreamer - The only way to stream!
We've purchased hundres (if not a few thousand) of those things, and they are dead-sturdy. You may have gotten a bad production run.
I had an Armada come through for repair yesterday, with a toasted power supply. The guy seemed upset that the casing near both hinges had snapped. After pointing out to him that the latch holding the laptop together had obviously been forcefully broken off of it, he conceded that "maybe, just MAYBE someone tried to force it open without using the latch".
I don't know what model it was, but this is just an anecdote.
"Champagne for my real friends - and real pain for my sham friends!" http://ericblade.postalboard.com/
it sounds like you're getting all you're going to get out of these laptops and compaq. whether or not you can prove them wrong when they say that no one else is complaining is a rather moot point, apart from the bad press they just got here on /. (i dunno how highly they were thought of before around here, all i know is that i'd certainly not buy one, had too many troubles with their desktops, let alone trying the laptops.)
vote with your dollars, and don't give compaq/HP/whoever anymore of your business. sounds like you've gotten as good as you're gonna get from them.
Seriously, I only know a little about injection molding, but the thinner the piece is, the more complex its shaped, the more likely it will fail under stress. And what part of the laptop's plastic gets stressed, other than the hinge?
I would venture a guess that Compaq's quest for ever smaller laptops, quick production/obselescence cycles, and general nonconcern for quality products has caught up them, and it's hurting you.
Oh well.
I know this doesn't answer the poster's question, but it addresses some of the other people whining about laptops and particular brands...
I've owned two Toshiba Tecras, the 750 and the 8100, and they are incredibly durable. I've beat the living crap out of them, dropped them off desks, down stairs, even kicked 'em a couple times, all by accident of course, and they continue to run splendidly.
Likewise, my office insists on buying Dell laptops and they are en route to and from the repair shop more often than not.
I have a notebook 100 which i have put heavy demand on (carrying in a bag to university every day) for the last two years and have found it to be very solid. It got damp in the rain which killed the CD-ROM drive, but thats my fault. The case has proved to very sturdy, the machine gets a little warm, mostly the hard disk and battery but they have both been reliable (battery life is very poor). I believe the armada 100 is in fact exactly the same machine, but it depends on when/where you bought it. I doubt many people put their laptops through as hard a life as i do, so i must say im suprised to hear of your problems. Guess i might just be lucky. Ive just upgraded to an IBM Thinkpad, also seems very study, hope i get a good 2/3 years life out of that as well.
I have a Dell Inspiron 5000e, with the UXGA screen (1600x1200), and it also is developing a crack on the left hand side, right next to the hinge. I was kind of baffled, but I do abuse this machine a bit, so I just wrote it off as that. Then I realized what really caused this, I was looking at how I adjusted the LCD, it was always with my right hand on the top right corner of the LCD, which should put quite a bit of tork on that corner. I adjust the screen quite frequently (I can't sit still), so it looks like this is my reward.
well i have an armada M700, and there are no craks as much as i can see...
But i have a broken pin in my serial port though, and i winder where did that come from...
The lunatic is in my head
I used to work at Oldsmobile, back when they made Diesel engines. They saw bunches of cracked wrist pins in the field that we couldn't duplicate in the lab. We tried running engines on starter fluid. We tried overloading them to the point of stalling. We even twisted some con rods so the wrist pin was flexing sideways as the piston went up and down and we never could crack one. The boss was going nuts, wondering why they stood up to our super abuse yet cracked for "Casper Milktoast" (as he put it). The point? Maybe something similar is going on here; maybe there's some residual stress in the lids that must be relieved, either through heavy use ("carrying in a bag to university every day") or by cracking ("on a VP's desk, no abuse").
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
My company has 3 Compaq DL360 Servers (1U, rackmount, only ~6 months old).
They must be made of cheap parts, because after they've been in the rack for more than a day or so, all three of them have been sagging in the middle.
Darn things can't support their own weight!
You can accomplish anything you set your mind to. The impossible just takes a little longer.
My wife and I both have laptops; I have a Compaq m700 (which, fortunately, is doing quite well) and my wife has a Gateway Solo 2150 (which, unfortunately, isn't doing so well).
Various things have gone wrong with her Gateway: the power management integration with Windows isn't up-to-par, the screens have habitual connection problems of some kind, and the batteries seem to fail. When I contacted tech. support about her failing screen (it would flicker in-and-out and various colors) I was confronted with the most bizzare questions that had nothing to do with the problem at-hand (my guess is it's their usual routine to avoid any hardware-based guilt on Gateway's part). Anyway, we sent the laptop in for repair and they fixed it... but only after sending it to the wrong person on the other side of the country, first. What a nightmare that was.
What's worse, the batteries (which, I think we can all agree) are pretty damn important to a laptop computer are only covered by a one-year warranty. And, wouldn't you know it, the battery stopped working shortly after said warranty expired. Thinking we had just abused the laptop by plugging it in too much and not draining the battery, I tried looking for a replacement on eBay, etc. What I found, in addition to a bevy (sp?) of used batteries available, is that this particular Gateway is infamous for battery failure (see this webpage on user complaints).
In fact, quite a few of those people claim that there is a problem beyond the battery... but I don't really have a way to substantiate that.
So, those of us with the Gateway Solo 2150 are left with a tethered laptop computer with no reasonable recourse. One guy (on the webpage mentioned earlier) was whispering about a class-action lawsuit... but, talk is cheap.
</rant>
I had an Armada 7800, I think. I cracked the case in a couple different places because I was living in a hotel with a little round table, and I tended to have the laptop on the table and sometimes rest my hand on the corner, which didn't have table under it. Sounds kind of stupid, but also I was a bit surprised about how little force it took to do that.
This is another case where "Macs are more expensive".
Other than a bit of chipped paint on some TiBooks (mine didn't have it) Apple's powerbooks have consistently gotten great reliability ratings, survived being run over by cars, and dropped from tall buildings.
And they cost less than comperable PCs (which, actually there aren't any because Intel Processors run at 1/3 to 1/6 speed on battery power and are slower to begin with)... yet have higher reliability.
The ironic thing is you could get a $2,500 apple powerbook, run MS Office under Virtual PC-- ie EMULATION-- and get better performance than a $4,000 Compaq running the same software off of battery....
Like saying "Why buy a Toyota when you can get a Yugo???"
Not to be obnoxious, but there really is a difference. If you're gona buy a PC laptop, get one from a quality manufacturer... of which I only know of one: IBM. Toshiba and sony may be high quality when it comes to laptops too.. but Dell, Gateway, Compaq, no-name-- how can you be suprised when your Yugo breaks down???
Yeah, and you guys panned the ipod too: http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/23
Toshibia
These are great laptops. We have a client who is in the business of mobile tax returns. They are also very tight with money. Now they have been using these laptops for 7 years without a problem. Nothing wrong with the physical construction and the components are still spinning
oh, plus you can't beat Toshibia's 3 year warrenty
I like the TiBooks, but this is absolutely bullshit:
> The ironic thing is you could get a $2,500 apple powerbook, run MS Office under Virtual
> PC-- ie EMULATION-- and get better performance than a $4,000 Compaq
Unless you have some benchmarks to back it up, don't go spreading around nonsense like this. Even the $3200 TiBook is a 800 MhZ G4, which is approximately as fast as a 1.8 Ghz celeron (see, for instance, cpuscorecard.com). If you think a 1.8 Ghz celeron laptop costs $4,000 (even from Compaq), well, you need a lesson in shopping. =)
I had an 1800T for a year, and just after the warentty expired, it started falling apart. The hard drive died a miserable death for no apparent reason. The case cracked at the hinge, and, depite all common sense, a peice of the case in the upper left corner cracked and broke out. The keys are pretty fragile, too; I lost the 'g' key by dropping a cordless phone on the keyboard. It breaking didn't bother me as much as the fix: I'd need to get a $100 keyboard when I probably broke about $.03 worth of plastic.
Too bad; until it started falling apart, I really thought highly of this laptop.
This post had nothing at all to do with the poster's question.
Did you have a similar experience with your Compaq Armada 100? No? Well, then, did you have a different experience? No? Then what the fuck are you talking about? Oh, your toilet-seat iBook doesn't crack. Who gives a fuck? You have been of absolutely no help.
I bought an HP Omnibook 5700 CTX and it did the same thing. It cracked right above the left hinge. I now have a HP Omnibook XE3 no problems yet. I think that laptops are built a lot better now.
This is Compaq we are talking about. Second worst reliability reputation of any computer manufacturer. (#1 being Packard Smell - Are they even still in business???)
I've had better experiences with Dells than many others have, esp. their Inspiron 8000 series. My dad has one, a friend at school has one, the research lab I was in at school had one, they all rocked. Their 7500s don't seem to be as well made - My apartmentmate had one and the battery door... Let's just say it was a HORRENDOUS design. Dell's reputation used to be stellar, they've gone WAY downhill, but they still blow away Compaq and probably always will.
A few years ago, I sold computers at my school's campus store. For destops: Gateway. Best prices, VERY sturdy design. Nice standard ATX cases - and ducted cooling, too! The Dell desktops we had at the time were subpar, with a tendency to develop weird noises.
Compaq couldn't make a laptop screen if their life depended on it. Average life of a Compaq laptop before the screen died = 1-2 months. 50% of the laptops that came into our service department were month-old Compaqs of various models with dead screens. (Nothing physically wrong, just dead connections.)
I agree with other posts here - IBM has the most durable laptops on the market (unless you consider those specially ruggedized ones), but you WILL pay much more for it. Toshibas tend to be solid and reasonably priced. We had mixed results with Gateway. (Unlike the desktops we sold, we couldn't reccommend one manufacturer across the board for our laptops. Toshiba ruled in the low price range, IBM in the mid, Gateway in the high end. Their low-end units sucked, but they had stuff in the high end that no one else had.)
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Compaq has never made fantastic laptops, but 60% is a little excessive. I agree with a previous posting in that there may have been a bad production run. That being said, Toshiba laptops are *alright* but prone to hardware problems with about a 10% failure rate in optical drives, 30% in hard drives and 20ish% in batteries failing in the first year (this is of the tosh's at work). Dell has so far proved to be a bit more reliable, and their complete-care warranty is amazing. I spilled coffee on one and they replaced it no questions asked, completly free of charge.
As for mac books, my pismo has been sent back a couple times for bad HDs. That being said, my TiBook (667 DVI) has fallen off of a table onto the front right corner (the corner with the DVD/CDRW combo drive). It was enough of an impact to crack the plastic and dent the metal casing but came through with no other problems. It's too new to judge reliability just yet though.
tinfoilmedia
Also, there has been a great push in the plastics manufacturing industry to prevent scrap and recycle. There are a few reasons why they do this, one being environmental concerns, but that is nothing compared to inventory accountability. Its insane how companies are trying to get 100% usage from raw materials. The molds and bleedoff from the extruder is reground, fed back into the system at up to a 25% ratio. Many times the operators have problems getting things to mold properly and have a stack of junk that the machine botched or QA sent back. It either goes into the dumpster, or its fed back into the system for "free." If you are a plant manager trying to increase profits, why not? It won't come back to haunt you for a long time.
The other problem is lead content in the plastics. Lead is a wonderful metal that does magic to the plastic's heat resistance and durability. It makes it softer and more resistant to the environment. You can make fireproof plastics with a 40% lead content. Chances are, the wires in your house have a small percentage of lead in the plastic's formula. This makes it withstand MUCH higher temperatures before it breaks down and burns your house to the ground. The problem is that its hazardous to work with and leaded plastics do not recycle well. They have to go to the dump when botched. If they are reground and recycled, they do not remelt like other plastics as they have cured permently.
Packard Bell was purchased by NEC a couple years ago.
Hah! I remember one joker at my last job carefully put his laptop in the leather case on the hood of his car. Slid every cable and dongle into their appropriate slots. Grabbed it by the leather handle and snatched it off the hood of his car at the same instant he remembered not zipping the case closed ... watched in slow motion as the laptop flew in a nice arc from the case to the concrete waiting below.
Cracked the screen, scratched the case up pretty good. Data was intact, at least it booted and I was able to find two virii and a buttload of porn in his IE cache. Talk about having a bad day.
Glonoinha
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
my Dell laptops are used constantly and have really had no issues with them.
-my first one was a p1333 XPi Latitude. nice solid machine that never gave me a bit of trouble. had it for 3 yrs then sold it to my dad who has had it since then for another 3 yrs. it's still running with no problems
-my second was a Latitude CPi model with a P333 cpu. that one had issues with the LCD screen and cable running thru the hinges. when I finally returned it for warranty work 2 weeks before expiration, somehow they lost it.....in the receiving dock.
Dell's answer? sent me a completely refurbished CPi Latitude P666 with win2k, 128MB ram, a 10gb hard drive, and a new carry bag. all within 1 week. they didn't even bother saying "Why don't we wait and see if it shows up?"
-my 3rd model is a 15" LCD Latitude C810 that I currently use for work since I travel a lot and use it for pen-testing and other things. again, no issues with this system.
I've used docking stations for all of these, and again, have never had issues.
when they asked me what kind of laptop I wanted for my job, I spec'd a Dell Latitude and said 'none other'. the only thing I wish now is that the laptops came with the old optical mouse track ball like my XPi P133 did. not too fond of glidepads because as you start typing, and then your thumb brushes the glidepad, it moves the cursor to the mouse pointer focus point. happens at least 2 twice a day.
now, Compaq laptops on the other hand......those have been nothing but trouble for all the employees at my agency that use those. flaky 120MB floppy drives, keyboard going out, batteries not holding a charge, the list goes on.
not even suitable for being a boat anchor.
I'm good with numbers -
MMMM.... Aqua. UNIX.
, 00.asp
700Mhz IBM Sahara G3.
Read more about the new Sahara chip here:
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,3959,95820
Have fun!
NEVER BUY THIS MODEL if you plan on running anything other then WinXP or freebsd. Linux gets irq conflicts among other major problems. My case cracked within 1 week of being bought at the left corner at the hindge and it started to crack the main monitor. I got it replaced luckily.
www.cgisecurity.com
Believe me, if I started murdering people, there would be none of you left.
I have 7 Inspiron 5000 in my Inventory and they crack on the left hinge and on top left corner (close to rubber stopper) every 6 months!!!
I usually wait until a couple are broken and call them on this They send a tech who replaces them for free.
same place as everyone else's.
The parent post is not flamebait. THIS is flamebait-- you fucking asshole stupid idiot moderating fucks who couldn't think your way out of a paper bag don't deserve to live, let alone reproduce, let alone moderate comments on slashdot.
This site increasingly looses its utility because there are too few actual thinking humnans aboard and far too many goosestepping idiot pc nazis.
Yeah, any time you point out that the macintosh doesn't suck, you're engaging in "flamebait". Sheesh. Not to long ago I had a post that was both +5 and "flamebait".
Metamoderation needs more teeth to clean out the gene pool, you fuckwads.
Your information, your life, it has NO value. Go kill yourself.
Yeah, and you guys panned the ipod too: http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/23
Just some info on another brand of laptop... I recently bought a Sager 2850 off of a friend of mine that works as a system admin at a local ISP. He used this laptop for over 2 years bringing it home and to work and other places as well. Running Red Hat for about a year and a half, and now in the hands of me running Slackware 8.1 with no problems, this macine has performed wonderful. The only sign of ageing i see is that of some worn paint on the corners, but that's to be expected. I havn't experienced any cracking or anything like that and I _do_ adjust my LCD a lot by the top corner(s). I would highly reccomend this brand, in fact I am thinking about buying another one very soon.
Even a stopped clock gives the right time twice a day.
Last year Bertelsmann in Germany (i'm working there) gave a free PC to everyone of their employees; with some extra charge you got an Armada E500 notebook.
Each of my collegues' notebooks, really each one, including my own, broke down after several months. The failure was always the same: little cracks at the hinge of the cover.
This is definitely no individual case, their whole Armada-series seems to suffer from that material defect.
(sorry about the "anonymous coward", that's due to non-disclosure-agreement-reasons.)