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Six Laptops That Don't Burn
digihome writes, "An exploding laptop can really ruin your weekend, so here's a review of six laptops that are unlikely to blow up." From the article: "We evaluated everything from battery and air vent temperatures, AC power draw and battery life to performance and price... What we found is that there's a real difference among those notebooks that know how to take the heat without sacrificing performance."
Why not just buy one of the OLPC machines? Price to performance and considering heat produced, nothing else can come close. I'm sure once Brazil and other countries start receiving theirs, we'll see them all over ebay for a bargain.
Seriously though, this is a great list, except for the fact that the machines are pretty expensive. If I was to blow that type of money on a laptop, I'd probably go for the Toshiba. But until then, I'll stick with my $500 Dell laptop. Sure it's a little bit slower (1.8Ghz I believe), but the battery is too small to catch anything on fire.
Crack - Free with every butt and set of boobs
Sony's name isn't on the list.
Any article that actually considers a laptop from Twinhead as a viable option loses all credibility, even if it does come last. They're junk. My most recent experience with a single Twinhead laptop involved two new hard drives, new RAM, a flakey power socket, a hinge that barely works and a battery pack with a failed cell (it splutters if you have the battery connected.) Prior experience involves machines that didn't come with the right bits and didn't recognise their own floppy drives.
Am I the only one getting this article rendered as though the CSS was written by throwing the keyboard down the stairs? (Firefox 2 on Linux)
Lithium fires like those that occur when a laptop battery explodes are extremely dangerous. Just watch this video.
Smug are we? You didn't look into the battery recall then.
I remember the first Aluminium PowerBooks. They became so hot, that the bottoms expanded to a convex shape after an hour of running. They tottered, wobbled and turned about, like a Weeble. This was really noticeable on the 12" models - where the footprint was so small, the curvature was really pronounced!
Now have the Sony exploding, flammable battery problem that Dell and Lenovo suffer from.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
I don't get how having a cool notebook translates into a battery that doesn't blow up. As far as I remember, the whole battery recall was because of a slight possibility of an internal short in LiIon cells. This had everything to do with manufacturing process and perhaps gravity, and nothing at all to do with the rest of the notebook. To suggest that these products avoided the recall because of their design is ignorant. They avoided the recall because they sourced different batteries.
Granted, a cooler notebook will result in longer batteries, since heat will reduce the effective capacity over time. That is the only advantage, from a power standpoint.
I am already a big fan of Panasonic's Tough Book series. The fact that they earn high marks in yet another review, power consumption and heat dissipation, merely cements my opinion of them as a top choice notebook.
I would previously recommend ThinkPads, but even before moving to Levono the quality was waning. The only thing the ThinkPad has that is superior is a longer warranty. Always buy the longest extended warranty possible for a laptop if you actually take it back and forth to school or work. The failure rate is abysmal. I pretty much expect a laptop to last a year without repair which translates to expect having to buy a new laptop a year after the warranty runs out.
Yeah, Dell has bad press lately. But that particular model uses a Samsung battery, not a Sony model. Very low draw, very good thermal characteristics. I've accidentally put it in my bag (which is a VERY snug fit) while running apps that kept it from entering standby several times - even after running in a sealed bag for a couple of hours, it's still running nice and solid. The bad and laptop were warm, but not at all hot. Having a Core Duo, 2 gigs of RAM, built-in mobile broadband, and still getting 5 hours of real-world runtime out of it are pretty nice, too.
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
My most recent experience with a single Twinhead laptop involved two new hard drives, new RAM, a flakey power socket, a hinge that barely works and a battery pack with a failed cell (it splutters if you have the battery connected.
:)
But what about the heat output? The convenient volume control wheel on the front edge? The "magnesium screen lid and bottom case with an attractive finish that looks like carbon fiber"?!
You didn't address the important stuff!
Everything I need to know about copyrights I learned from Slashdot.
I've asked the Apple 'Geniuses' about this on both a MacBook and MBP. While it wasn't *that* pronounced, both warped enough that they wouldn't sit flat on the table (notably worse on the MacBook). I don't know whether the MacBook was from heat or poor QC as it never got astonishingly hot during use, but I know it's heat related on my MBP, which I've seen report CPU temps upwards of 85c (where Applecare did absolutely nothing except replacing the main logic board with one that not only failed to fix the heat issue but started causing video corruption).
I'm not bashing Apple here - my old Gateway was almost as hot, and considerably louder (the fan was off-balance for most of its life; both very loud and almost always on since day one). As the MBP is often on a table it's not the end of the world, but Apple's engineers need to do some rethinking. I've also got a Thinkpad of nearly equal spec (almost identical to a MB except for the size, with over an hour more battery life) and it very rarely gets warm and the fan is never noticible. Apple genius's thoughts: "well, it's plastic, it won't heat up as much". Okay, well I guess IBM/Lenovo use a superplastic that dissipates heat better than aluminum... not even the copper heatsink section of the body gets warm, yet my MBP with plenty of metal surface area to dissipate that heat really roasts. Last I knew, added surface area for more heat dissipation meant a cooler system, but I guess IBM and Apple don't follow the laws of thermodynamics.
Translation: I still love my MBP (for the OS, not so much the hardware), but the Thinkpad (T60, if you care) runs very cool and has quite a bit of kick to it, with the main faults being a crappy display and Windows (unfortunately, OSx86 on it wasn't functional or reliable enough, or else it'd have been a best-of-both-worlds). For around $1100 I think (school paid for mine), it gives me a solid 5+ hours of battery life (it seems closer to 6 in Vista for some reason that escapes me) and no roasted legs. With a nicer, preferably widescreen, display, and OS X, I'd say it's pretty close to my ideal laptop. Except how the stupid black plastic gets laughably greasy if you ever handle the thing without wearing gloves. If Apple were to talk to the Thinkpad engineers to deal with their heat issues, they'd have a pretty nice system (as I doubt IBM/Lenovo talking to Apple about their choice of OS issue will get them anywhere). They certainly look pretty and OS X is the real reason to buy the thing, but Apple's portables really have a couple pretty inexcusable issues, most significantly heat (rounding the edges where your wrists tend to rest wouldn't get a "no" vote from me either).
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
How funny is it that in a discussion about burning laptops, your post got modded "Flamebait"?
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Look into smcFanControl http://www.conscius.de/~eidac/software/page5/page5 .html
Set it to something like 3000 rpm, which you can barely notice, and bam, cooler lap. Of course, this shouldn't be required, but until they get the heat issues sorted out...
This P-P-P-Powerbook won't burn.
I have to agree with parent post. Twinhead laptops are very disappointing. I own one and using it right now (model E14AL if you care) and only had problems with it. It killed two RAM in the first 3 months, then had to replace the motherboard, dvd drive died last month, plastic case is of very bad quality and get scratched very easily (can scratch it with your nails!), and now my the screen fixations are going away. After one year of use, I'm about to buy a new laptop, as I fear it's going to die soon and continually fixing it will prove to be more costly than buying a brand new one (hey, warranty has just expired!).
Ok, about heating problem, it's terrible. First, the fan and air intake are located on the bottom of the laptop, which means u need to use it on a perfectly flat desk and not on your lap or bed as it would obstruct all air flow. Second, the fan sometimes doesn't turn on at all and the laptop ends to power down after overheating too much.
That's my first Twinhead computer and my last one. I don't want to generalize to every single laptop built by Twinhead, but their Efio (EXXX) models are crap. Poor quality parts and bad quality standards. Better pay more and get a more robust computer.
Ced
I find it amusing that America, whose citizens love to claim the best of everything, still use an outdated system of measurement.
Ezekiel 23:20
Drives American girls wild, when you tell them that you have got a 12 cm penis
Base 10 is much easier than base 12.
I would understand a base 2 system.
We have one measure for distance.
The meter. km, cm, mm, micrometers are just a way to not use the zeroes. The unit is the same.
You have lots of different ways to measure stuff. I don't know how you can tell right away which is longer, two and a half feet, or 27 inches. 29 ounces or two pounds.
Celsius and Farenheit is not that much of a problem, aside fromt he fact that it makes more sense to use water than CO2 as the base of an imperfect system, but it makes more sense to have a scale that is based on ten, and has some coherence.
since I don't even carry a battery in my laptop. After a couple of years I realized that I never use it when I'm not near an outlet anyway, so I just took it out and left it in the bag. I suppose it could burst into flames there...