Results tagged “Laptops suck” from CLICK

As I write in this week's print column, I'm getting ready to give the Ubuntu- and CentOS-powered $0 Laptop to our 5-year-old daughter.

I mentioned that I do have a replacement that was working out pretty well. Of course that wellness went considerably south in the past few days (as chronicled in Dark Side of the Laptop), but I remained determined to prep the laptop, which is currently running Ubuntu/Xubuntu 8.04 LTS as its No. 1 distro, for our daughter, who used it tonight to run TuxPaint.

Whether or not my new/old Toshiba (or newer/just-as-old/identical Toshiba) works out, I'm ready to move on. I've got boxes I've set up in the past couple of months (The Self-Reliant Thin Client, The Debian Mac, which I bet I could finally set up with OpenBSD and actually get it to boot) that could be used more, and boxes I haven't yet had time to work on (an old Dell with something in the 1 GHz-ish range and for some reason stuffed with 256 MB of ECC server memory).

I'm also thisclose to getting my hands on a Sun Sparcstation 20, a box that was the envy of every self-respecting geek ... in 1995. That could be a fun project, don't you think?

(Image above from http://mike.kruckenberg.com)

We've pretty much reached the point at which it's probably cheaper to buy a laptop computer than it is to purchase a comparable desktop PC with the keyboard, mouse and monitor needed to make it all work.

Of course if you have all of those things — especially the monitor — you will still save money by buying just the desktop box and keeping as many of your old peripherals as will work.

But it seems like the graphs of "laptop cost" and "desktop cost" have finally intersected.

Laptops are convenient. You can carry them almost anywhere, use them almost anywhere ... you always have a keyboard, mouse (in the form of a touchpad) and monitor attached ...

Can you see where I'm headed?

Laptops break. And they're hard to fix. Often really hard.

And instructions on how to fix them are either really detailed (like those for Macs from ifixit.com) or, shall we say, "nonexistent."

I couldn't have replaced our 2003 Macintosh iBook G4's hard drive without the lengthy instructions from ifixit.com, and even with them, the procedure took three hours and had me cursing more than twice.

I thought that PC-based laptops put their hard drives in "civilized" places. On both my 1999 Compaq Armada 7770dmt and 2002 Gateway Solo 1450, I could swap out a hard drive by removing five screws, switching the drive and reversing the procedure. Five minutes from start to finish.

Now that I'm using this 2002 Toshiba 1100-S101 — hell, I've got TWO IDENTICAL MODELS — I find out little about how to replace their hard drives other than that "it's not easy."

There's no easily-accessible bay like in the Compaq and Gateway. The one forum post I found said that just about everything needs to be torn apart to get at the hard drive.

And now that the Toshiba on which I'm running OpenBSD seems to be slowly dying, the prospect of getting the drive out and trying it in the other Toshiba is looking to be way harder than I'd like it to be.

Clearly I should've spent more time with the other Toshiba before I decided which one I'd be using.

Here are the major parts of each laptop and their problems:

Case:

Toshiba 1 looked better from the outside
Toshiba 2 had a prominent crack that was somehow repaired

Keyboard:

Toshiba 1 has fairly worn keys. The space bar is a bit unresponsive toward the ends
Toshiba 2 seems fine

Touchpad:

Toshiba 1's has a tendency to stop working at all for short periods of time. After a certain length of time it also starts to become very erratic (a USB mouse always works fine).
Toshiba 2's touchpad seems fine, but I haven't used it enough to know for sure.

CD/DVD drive:

Both Toshiba 1 and 2 have very picky optical drives when it comes to reading CD-R discs. Each will only read/boot a few of my many CD-Rs. And each boots different ones.

Screen:

Toshiba 1 came to me with a sticker on it that said "bad screen." But since it seemed to work, I just went forward with my floppy/network install of OpenBSD 4.4. Today, though, the screen began blanking out intermittently. Squeezing the bottom plastic portion of the screen will often (but not always) fix it.
Toshiba 2's screen seems fine.

Sound:

Toshiba 1's sound is intermittent in both Windows and OpenBSD.
Toshiba 2's sound seems fine.

Hard drive:
Toshiba 1's hard drive runs fine.
Toshiba 2's drive seems a bit noisy

Floppy drive:
Both seem fine.

Battery:
I've learned to expect nothing from old laptop batteries. I haven't even tried using them.

CMOS battery:
Toshiba 1 powered up with the correct time and date. No problems since.
Toshiba 2 powered up with a 1999 time and date. I suspect that the CMOS battery is dead.

Ever try replacing a CMOS battery in a laptop? Some are easy to replace but super-expensive to buy (my Compaq), others are commonly found and inexpensive but seem impossible to extract (my Gateway).

The bottom line is that laptops are extremely convenient. But they are still quite expensive, and for the most part disposable. In the past few months, I've heard about plenty of bricked laptops — Macintosh and PC.

At my office, I have a Dell Optiplex GX520 that's now probably three or four years old. Actually, we've got quite a few dozen of them. I beat the hell out of the thing, and it just keeps working. I've spilled plenty of things into the keyboard. It still works.

Since it's a Dell and not a generic box assembled from off-the-shelf parts, it wouldn't be as easy to fix as something I put together from TigerDirect or Newegg-purchased components, but if the hard drive, optical drive, mouse, keyboard or monitor died, I'd have it fixed in a few minutes.

I'm as guilty as anybody of spending a lot of time (but in my case almost no money; all these dead and dying machines have been free or nearly so) using laptops. I don't have a "home office" that I actually work in (it's a sordid tale that I won't even begin to relate), so when I do work at home, it's pretty much on a laptop.

When, after suffering for over a year with the Gateway Solo 1450's not-to-be-tamed-by-any-BSD CPU fan, I found in the Toshiba 1100 a laptop with no CPU fan problem in OpenBSD.

Never mind that its optical drive, touchpad, keyboard, sound and display are not exactly ship-shape.

But I can run OpenBSD in peace. And for the past hour, the screen hasn't gone blank. The touchpad has even continued to work.

While the first Toshiba booted Debian Etch and a Half's netinstall CD (and nothing else, leaving me to install OpenBSD from a floppy — and damned glad that's an option), the second Toshiba booted Debian Lenny's business-card CD and Knoppix.

And I'm wondering how useful Windows XP is to me on either of these laptops. Even if I do manage to figure out the admin password and can bring them from Service Pack 1 to whatever it is XP is up to now. (Is it the SP3 that my Dell desktop for some reason refuses to install?)

If I get the time (and if Toshiba No. 1's screen doesn't continue to cooperate), I'll probably be running Debian Lenny from Toshiba No. 2 before the end of this week.

I did pull the memory door on one of the Toshiba's, and I was pleased to learn that the 256 MB is on a single SODIMM, meaning I could pull the module from one and have 512 MB in the other.

I'd probably be better off loading up the other Dell desktop I have waiting in the proverbial wings. It's not a server, but it uses this expensive PC800 Rambus ECC server memory. (What was Dell thinking, other than "mmmm ... expensive memory"?) Maybe it'll do OK with the 256 MB loaded in there now. And there's always my Power Mac G4/466, which runs Debian Etch fairly well in 384 MB of RAM (but without Flash video, since there's no Flash in the world of non-Mac-OS PowerPC). ...

I'll give Toshiba 1's hinky screen another week. Because I'm weak.