Slashdot Mirror
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?"
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.
Actually, company-owned laptops sometimes get treated almost that badly. At a former company, the CEO was fond of throwing his laptop across the office when he was angry. Other highlights include:
People carrying them from desk to desk using the screen as a handle.
Spilled soda, coffee, etc. on the keyboards.
Network cable accidentally looped around an armrest... employee swings around in his chair and propels himself towards a coworkers desk... laptop meets the hardwood floor.
Because there is rarely any real punishment for breaking your company laptop, it doesn't take long to become completely nonchalant about accidents that would cause your hair to stand up on end if they happened to your own computer.
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 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 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 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. =)
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.
What? You mean my PIII 850 slows down to 280mhz? I don't think so. Try to 700 (only if I want it to), and that will still outpreform MS Office under Virtual PC on a $2500 Powerbook (ie the 667 model).
I am an avid user of both Mac and PC machines. I know what I am talking about, you on the other hand are one of the poor brainwashed Apple zealots. Try to at least bash the competition properly.
And I'd like to point out that my Compaq laptop (Also an Armada M700) has been great. Armada laptops in general (and their new name Evo) have been great machines. A wide varity are used by my teammates, and I haven't seen any need a repair beyond the battery or a replacement "eraser head" for the mouse. Plus it has three buttons, great for middle-clicking for tabs in Mozilla. Thats one thing that drives me nuts about the Powerbook. Professional laptop, one button mouse. Let me know when I can run programs like OS X and pro apps properly on a Powerbook without an external mouse or keyboard shortcuts to use context menus, and I'll consider one.
Although that isn't a very fair comparison. Try comparing, speed wise. Of-course Running office under VPC will be slow. You're emulating an entire operating system (Windows XP, or whatnot) under OSX.
Try running the native version, and see if the speed is any better. Also, try to use the OSX version of office, as the old version will run in mac emulator. [1]
Colin Davis
[1] Aka Classic mode. I tend to think of my powerbook as a NeXT box, that can fire a a very high quality MacOS emulator.
"classic" mode starts seperatly, and the GUI style changes when you use it. It's a seperate OS in the background
Colin Davis
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?
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.
You wouldn't, I was just giving an example-- that if you require PC specific software, you're still better off getting a mac and running under emulation when it comes to laptops.
The performance hit you take with office is NOTHING like the performance hit you take on a PC when you unplug it from the wall...
On a PC laptop, they cut the clock rate to 1/3 of the normal clock rate to save battery power!
Yeah, and you guys panned the ipod too: http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/23
BZZT Wrong. Thanks for playing.
Even a 700MHz pentium will get its ass kicked by a 667MHz PowerPC-- and even under emulation the exceesive speed of the powerpc will still make it better to run it on the Powerbook than on a pc natively.
I'm not brainwashed-- you are. I simply know processor design and know that a PC running off of battery cuts the clock rate to 1/3, 1/4 or 1/6th the normal clock rate.
Or, maybe you can run yours almost at full speed-- and get almost ZERO battery life, which of course isn't quite fair because the Apple will still get a long, normal, basttery life and kick its ass performance wise-- just not by as much.
Oh, and piss off on the mouse issue- that dog won't hunt. This is science here, not your opinion. Multibutton mice slow people down. ITs a fact. Deal with it.
Yeah, and you guys panned the ipod too: http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/23
This is your perception, but not actually true.
Three button mice slow down experienced users as well.
The studies were done in the 80s... go check them out.
There is a difference between perceived time and by-the-clock time.
You perceive it to be faster, but by the clock it isn't.
That's one of the problems with CHI. Users ignore the studies that were done and continue to insist their perception is reality, science be damned.
Yeah, and you guys panned the ipod too: http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/23
Dude. I have the exact same problem with the same machine. I've already sent it in once to be completely rebuilt. The hinges on these things were NOT designed to handle these huge honking screens. Every tech I've talked to has said that these laptops are the most troublesome of all the models Dell has made. Get the thing repaired quickly though, 'cause if you don't the damage will just keep spreading.
sigs are a waste of space
Fuck, this is my problem, and my warrantee is wearing out. Ugh! Someone has got to go after them with some kind of a class action.
sigs are a waste of space
Yes, a 700mhz PIII will get it's ass handed to it by a 667 PowerPC when running a synthetic benchmark, or Photoshop, or whatever. But the 700 PC will ALWAYS outpreform a PowerPC running Virtual PC. Period, end of story, thanks for playing. If you want proof, go try it in real life sometime.
And show me where PC laptops slow down that much. Like I said, my 850 goes down to 700. And it gets awesome battery life.
And I have to agree, where is the scientific proof that having three buttons will slow me down compaired to having to click and hold to get to context menus. And I still stand by my point, a professional laptop needs professional features. I simply CANNOT run a pro app like Maya on a Powerbook without keeping an external USB mouse close by.
Thanks for repeating what you said and ignoring the facts.
Such denial. Sheesh. You don't even know how fast the processor in your own computer actually is.
Its a shame that so many people have been fraudulently sold pcs.
But its unacceptable that they go around showing their stupidity and calling it superiority.
Yeah, and you guys panned the ipod too: http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/23