pouët.net

Am I doing something wrong, or just very unlucky?
My three-month old laptop(Dell Inspiron 8500)'s 60 gig hard drive just suddenly died. I was using Notepad when there was a beep, a BSOD, and then my hard drive suddenly disappeared. Apparently the spindle has cracked, or the disk has warped, but for whatever reason everything else is fine except the hard drive. I'm reduced to using Knoppix on a very expensive dumb terminal while I await arrival of my new drive. The failure is apparently not my fault unless I can bend platters with my mind.
The previous laptop (Dell Inspiron 8000) was a lemon, and had to have its motherboard replaced three times over a period of four years, before September 2003 when its hard drive got bad sectors and became unbootable. I'm told that the Inspiron 8000 motherboards were cr@p and had tons of failures.
I have compiled simplistic ANSI C code on very old DOS machines that has caused them to lock up twice, and then refuse to boot (which even the sadistic old-fashioned computer guy who maintains them doesn't think is my fault; he thinks it was dust and old flaky wiring. But twice?).
Every failure has been while under warranty or repaired at no cost to me, and none of these failures seem to be anything I could have physically caused (I don't drop stuff, I don't stick stuff into the fan slots)

My question is this: Does anyone else have this rate of hardware failures, or am I just spectacularly unlucky? I watch lots of demos, I tried to install Linux on that drive at one point, I tend to run my laptop for long periods of time, and generally use my computer for a lot more than most people I know (and they have no sympathy for me).

<New York accent>
Here's your problem, buddy.

"I tried to install Linux on that drive at one point"
</accent>

I gave up on the Gentoo install a month or so ago when I couldn't get XFree86 to work.
I suspect trying to defragment the drive earlier that day did it in.

Dell is teh shit.
Get a real laptop.

I feel sorry for you mate. I have a mate that is excactly like you. Me on the other hand, i am a hardware Hog. I throw it around, drop it, spill coffee, cola, powder you name it in it. But i never had one piece of hardware die on me, that i didnt kill on my own, by exessive oc'ing. Well...actually i had one. My clockradio, died for some reason, and i never hit tat particular one.

I guess some people are just unlucky around hardware. But your choice of hardware arent all good either it seems. Dell is shit, they use shit components. and everybody i know who have used their POS have been unhappy, or had failures of somekind. If you want a good laptop get ANYTHING but a dell. only thing good about dell is that they are said to have a good costumer suppport. But no wonder is it? they bloody need it, to keep the lynch mob off their doors.

You may want to talk to the Limp Ninja people about impressive HW failure rates. They usually go through multiple failures of the absolute kind every demoparty.

iblis: dell and good customer support. Are you kidding?
I heared the opposite. Perhaps they changed?

phred: no problem for me here. the cooling fan of my inspiron 8200 died and was replaced within one day, but ok, i've bought this expensive pack of insurances and in-place replacement stuff.

Concerning the HD... IBM/Hitachi HDs are now quite famous for dying on you if they get above a certain temperature (that's a known hardware bug, but you all should know fight club and a*b*c=x), and judging from the temp meters of my notebook this can happen quite easily if you accidentally cover up the cooling slots. So who knows.

I would take this as an indication that you should look at other brands.

Dell got a rather cool customer support ... at least had, in 2000, when my inspiron 3800 died (I ordered it in france and was working in finland at the time) .. I just called them and a dell guy showed up at my work place the day after to replace the cpu.

crusader: well, don't know whether you're cursed or not, but so I am too! I stopped counting my hardware failures (on NEW, never used before hardware) cause I think there's nothing that can be done... generally, hardware (speaking of the pc) is a pile of shit, and sometimes, you buy something that works, but you don't know why or how it works.

I thought that laptops were less affected by these failures, I see they just don't. too bad though, 'cause I was planning to by a Dell laptop to replace my old pile of hardware-that-sometimes-works-but-dont-know-why-it-does.

some facts are: never buy anything with VIA controllers or IBM hard drives. I think that nvidia controllers suck, too (apart of their graphics controllers of course!).

finally, I think that when it comes to fiability and stability, Intels wins. Too bad 'cause AMD cpus are damned good, but no motherboard customer seems to buy appropriate motherborads for this cpu... So buy somethig with a pile of Intel Inside logos on it, and here you are!

***BEGIN RANT***
phred and iblis: Dell's customer support is pretty good; I just wish I didn't have to use it so often. I guess they get lots of practice. Grrr. While I'm at it, the I8500 design is inferior to the I8000- I could toggle stretch-to-fit-screen vs actual pixels from anywhere with the touch of a button, and I also had TWO drive bays instead of one, and TWO PCMCIA slots. I don't really care that it's 5 cm thick, I want to USE it. I guess laptops are no longer 'computers you can take with you' but 'portable devices that are also computers'.
They don't make computers like they used to. My family still has a 1988 Tandy 1000 TL/2 (286, PCjr hardware stuffage) lying around that still works as well as it did the day we got it, and then there's my uncle's Amiga 2000 that except for the joystick also works fine, and of course, all C-64's in use today are something like 10 years old now, right?
They just don't make computers durable anymore. Calculators, on the other hand, well, I've accidentally dropped, kicked and generally abused my TI-200 graphing calculator for two years now and it still works fine!
kb_: It IS a hitachi drive, and I had been sitting it on my bed from time to time. Interesting... Maybe I should have asked the tech to send me a Fujitsu drive instead.

Oh, this also reminded me of the story in the 303 .nfo about Statix destroying several of Vic's computers while trying to make 303... And this one girl in my major at college whose laptop broke sometime in September but she never bothered to tell anyone until late October... I guess I have high standards for computer functionality. As in, that they work.

Perhaps my next computer will be an Apple Powerbook G5.
***END RANT***

I never ever buy brand named computers for the simple fact that their configuration is crap as hell. They almost always include the latest Intel CPU with its high frequency in huge letters, but the rest of the system consists of the crappiest and cheapest crap you can possiby find in the junkyards of Taiwan. That includes harddisks, usually motherboards, soundcards, VGA and memory modules, not to mention monitors of the lowest quality and modems that need a miracle to actually work.

It also pleases me that recently the trend of selling "white box" laptops is increasing. The fact that almost all laptops are brand names is a very serious reason why I never bothered to buy one until now.

ARGH!

The replacement hard drive just failed!
Dell sux!

This time, I think I know why. The palm rests on the laptop are right over the hard drive and the sound card... If you happen to press down on them, the plastic is also very bendy because they made the laptop as thin and light as they possibly could.
Not durable, oh no.

Why is it that people think that looking after hardware and keeping it in a padded box is good for it, when all the time we hear of things being thrown, kicked and dropped and working fine, and other things being looked after and lasting less than a week.

Face it, if you want to keep your machine working it should be regularly mistreated. And by the way the best way to fix a fucked up harddisk is to power it up, then give it a good hard smack with a screwdriver. I've fixed a few that way.

Hey has anybody heard of the freezer trick? Supposedly you can take a defunct hard drive, stick it in the freezer overnight, and the next day have it work long enough to get most of the data off. I've heard several cases where this works.

yeah, freezer is supposed to work too, but the hitting it trick is more fun.

I only wish there really was a freezing trick.

Oh, and psonice, how about dropping it off the roof of a building? That ought to get it to work perfectly

Crusader: Both tricks really work. I had an old Seagate HD onece that I had to smack onto the ground whenever I powered up the PC, and there's nothing better than freezers for rescuing data off dead IBM harddisks. Tried both, ad both worked. Somehow. :)

ibm thinkpad laptops are crap too (anybody cares? :)

i used to have a 486dx2 motherboard which you had to bend for some minutes and meanwhile periodically pressing the reset button to get it work :)

general hardware treatment: if does not work, kick into it. works fine with my amplifier for example :)
works also with motherboards, monitors, caffee/coke automats, keyboards, laptops, isa/vesa/pci cards (bend 'em!), probably even with harddrives, if you are gentle enough...

Well, I've had the new hard drive for nearly a month, and my surge suppressor started beeping at me.
Actually it wasn't beeping, just today it wouldn't stop when I unplugged and plugged it back in again, and now I know it's my laptop's power adaptor cord.
Well, on the advice of a friend, I tapped the power adaptor on the ground, the beeping stopped and the power light went on.
Once again, Dell makes things so much more irritating.
Perhaps I should have slammed the HD on the ground.

I had 4 Maxtor harddisks fail already. Waiting for anythor 2 to do that. ;) That's fate. My neihbour's Samsung also seems to be not OK. But at least this machine i built 2 weeks ago has been 100% stable and very fast. Knock on the wood.

About strange hardware pieces, I have a shy monitor.
True.
When I turn on my PC the monitor is red, then after some minutes (helped by a couple punches) becomes pink, to become correctly white after more minutes (and more punches).
Anyone has experience with shy monitors?
Should I try with hypnosys?

pan : i allready saw pink monitor.
it is because it is bad quality, old, and stay too much in front of sun. phospore is burn in it, the cathodic tube is bad. it becomes normal only when it becomes hot (it can takes 15 minutes) and one day it will stay pink forever, chemical process. sell it now if you can find a customer ;)
you have probably a second problem, the weldings becomes dryness after some years (5 for bad quality stuff and 12 for high quality stuff), and when you punch it, the electric contact comes. only solution is to redone every weldings on the chips card!

I had a mate who had a "shy" speccy when i was a kid. It would fail to load every single time... unless we all left the room. THen it would load 8 times out of 10... I still remember waiting outside the bedroom door saying "do you think it's loaded yet?" "better give it 5 more minutes" "Don't peep, or it won't load" etc.