[Kamikaze]

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=32550

[Solatar]

What is it with laptops blowing up lately? Are they manufacturing them differently or something?

[aceofspades]

On roughly the same topic, never ever ever buy an HP hard drive unless you live in a parallel universe.

[Black Wolf]

I live in a parallel universe...

[aceofspades]

KEWL SEND PIX PLZ K THX LOL

[SadisticSid]

That must have been caused by the battery. There isn't any other component (that I know of) in your typical laptop that could go boom with that kind of firework display...

[vyper]

**** this - they'll start banning laptops from planes if we're not careful.

[Kosh]

What is it with laptops blowing up lately? Are they manufacturing them differently or something?

Spate of bad batteries I think. All it takes is one little flaw in the manufacturing and then, boom.

I did hear some guy at MIT is working on something that would replace traditional batteries all together. I hope he can pull it off.......

[Fineus]

I did hear some guy at MIT is working on something that would replace traditional batteries all together. I hope he can pull it off.......

Was that something to do with using nano-tech to create tiny capacitors rather than standard batteries, allowing for a much larger / longer storage and faster charge?

[Turambar]

w00t capacitance!  Faraday FTW!  gotta say that'd be pretty cool, nanotech is teh hawtness.  as for dell laptops, even if they don't explode, the hard drive will fail on you.  i say this with no uncertainty.  the hard drive will fail.     its only a matter of time (of course, with enough time any hard drive will fail, my point is that the dell ones will do it in a hurry)

[redsniper]

Crap... I just got a dell laptop as a graduation gift.

[Tyrian]

Then send it back, fast.  I can second the Dell hard drive failure stories.  My old Dell drive fried and a friend of mine's too.  The same goes for drives by Seagate.  Those only last for about 6 months...  If you want good drives, go with Western Digital...those are the stuff...  Plus, Dell cooling systems are terrible.  If your drive doesn't fail, the system will bake alive.  Or, if you're really lucky (like I am), the heat will kill your hard drive.   

In short, do this to Dells (Smilies = Dells):    or

[CP5670]

I have a Dell laptop with an OLED. Seriously, the display is so thin it can be bent like paper. And I love how the battery falls out whenever I pick it up off a table. Of course, none of that compares to the fact that it overheats and throttles in less than five minutes of load, like any games or math computations. It's good I got this thing as a prize and didn't actually pay for it. It's actually pretty old now, but I rarely need to use a laptop anyway so I haven't bothered getting a new one.

[achtung]

Dell needs to stick to desktop units.

[Taristin]

The same goes for drives by Seagate.  Those only last for about 6 months...  If you want good drives, go with Western Digital...those are the stuff...

Bull****.
I think you have that reversed. I have 2 Seagate SATA's that I have had for over a year each and not the slightest hiccup. I had a maxtor that died in 7 months, and a WD that would sporatically fail 7 times in the course of 5 years.

Seagate > * in my book.

[achtung]

I have a maxtor that's been running strong for 7 years.  It's in an old Dell XPS T450

[Solatar]

I hate Maxtor...I had a 40 gig drive that connected by firewire. It died and somehow ****ed up my other HD as well, so I had to reinstall Windows.

Was a big problem since that was my back-up drive.

[CP5670]

I have had an IBM, a Maxtor and a Seagate die. The Maxtor loss was the big one, as it took down my FS2 campaign and lots of other stuff with it. I was able to get everything off the IBM before it died and the Seagate one failed in less than a week after I got it, so I didn't lose anything.

I currently have the replacement for that dead Maxtor, a newer WD and a Seagate in service, along with whatever is in that Dell laptop. I guess the IBM one still occasionally works, although it sounds like a vacuum cleaner and gives read errors most of the time.

The old 160MB drive in my Mac is also still going strong after 16 years. They don't make them like they used to.

[Windrunner]

i have worked to the dell support on their laptop division here in sweden i can tell you that majority of the cases that we got in was HDD or motherboard replacement. I have an old dell latitidue C610 and its working perfectly now, luclkly i only needed to change the keyboard,motherboard, LCD and the palmrest:D

[Descenterace]

Most of my hard disks are made by Maxtor, but those are all 80GB or less. Newer, larger Maxtor disks seem to run very hot and noisy.
The only large disk I have is a 200GB Seagate SATA. It's usually fine, but when copying large files to or from an NTFS partition on it, the whole system freezes and requires a hard reset. I'm fairly sure it's a disk problem and not a mainboard issue, since the mainboard has been upgraded twice.

The only other SATA disk I bought was an 80GB Western Digital. It was DOA. The only way I could get it to even spin up was to plug it in after booting the system. I found out later that this is a common problem with WD's 80GB SATA disks.

I won't be buying any more SATA equipment for a good three years or so, until they finish working the bugs out. Some of my friends have large numbers of SATA disks that seem to work fine; they're mainly Maxtor or Hitachi disks.

I still have that 80GB WD lying around somewhere, because I forgot to RMA it until after the return period had expired. At some point, I'm going to 'destruct test' it with a claw hammer...