If you haven’t yet given in to the lure of a tablet computer, and are shopping for a laptop, especially round Christmas, check something out first: See how warm it gets.
My church lends me this HP laptop. (Specifically, an HP Pavilion dv4. Yeah, it’s not new. But they bought it new.) I make multimedia presentations, and do a little graphic design, with the thing. No doubt it was bought because it was an inexpensive machine. But you get what you pay for. I don’t know how the current HP designs are, but this one’s a lemon. In 20 minutes, it can heat up to the point it shuts itself off.
I first discovered this some years ago. I set the laptop on my couch, and after a few minutes the screen dimmed to black. I thought it was the screensaver, but I couldn’t wake the computer back up. After another minute, the hard drive spinning like mad, it turned itself off.
Turns out it went into hibernate mode, and backed up the
Why does it overheat? Lousy fan placement. The intake for the fan is on the underside of the laptop. If you set it directly on a table, there’s a three-millimeter space between the surface of the table and the intake. That’s pretty much blocked. After an hour or two, it’s too much for the poor machine, and in protest the screen goes dark.
Put it on a soft surface, like a cushion or bed or tablecloth, and the intake vent is fully blocked. Then, we’re talking 10 to 20 minutes before it blinks out.
My usual way of dealing with the problem is to sit with the computer half hanging off the edge of the table, so the vent is fully unobstructed. Or I gotta put the laptop on my knee—probably cooking my tendons and requiring a future knee replacement, but that’s probably just a worst-case scenario.
The fan runs constantly. Because of its constant use, the thing wears out pretty quick. Two years ago it started rattling from overuse, and as a result the computer would shut down every 20 minutes, whether I put it on a soft surface or not. This wasn’t good… ’cause I was running video off it for Sunday morning services. Twenty minutes into worship, the screen would go dark and the words would vanish of the screen. I’d have to cool down the computer as quick as possible and reboot it. And the noisy fan wasn’t any fun for the folks in the back rows.
We all thought the solution to the problem was a fan replacement. I investigated since, and found out it wasn’t necessarily. The thing rattles because dust and stuff gets sucked in. The way to fix it is, I kid you not, to take the computer entirely apart. Entirely. Because the fan is located in the least-accessible part of the machine; you can’t just pop off the bottom cover and get to it. You gotta unscrew the base from the top, remove the keyboard, remove the screen, remove the motherboard, and then you can get at that fan. And probably fix the whole problem with a few blasts of compressed air.
Well, after the malfunctioning computer messed with the Sunday service, the church splurged for a repair guy to dissect the computer and fix the problem. And then, to be on the safe side, buy another computer. We now use a Mac Mini, which works great. I still use the laptop, though, to make some slides and ads from home.
The moral: If you’re shopping for a computer, remember to check out that store display. If the store won’t leave it on for 12-hour stretches, for fear the thing will overheat and blink out, you don’t want it.
But for word processing and bible study, I still use my 14-year-old clamshell iBook.
Oh, it’s got its own problems. The battery has a bad habit of going dead without warning. It’s supposed to give you a one-minute countdown, but it just blinks out. The AirPort card is incompatible with Comcast’s wireless router (although it works just fine everywhere else), so the only way I can use internet is to take it downstairs and plug in the Ethernet cable. Certain keys on the keyboard won’t work unless I pop the board out of its housing. And forget watching video on it; the processor can’t handle anything but the lowest-quality YouTube stuff, if that. Apple and the software manufacturers stopped supporting it years ago.
But, its glitches aside, it works. Can’t say that about every Apple product I’ve ever bought, but this sucker works. And all I usually want to do on a computer is write anyway, so I’ll probably keep it till it finally does die. I think I can squeeze another decade out of it.
See, when I buy computers, I want to squeeze a decade out of them. I know; planned obsolescence means I should be upgrading every two or three years, but I don’t wanna. I got a decade out of my Macintosh Quadra; I got about seven years out of my falling-apart iBook 100, and I’m still using my 11-year-old Pocket PC. It’s for the same reason frugal people don’t buy a new car every year: It feels like a giant waste of money for what, in the end, are a few new features, but not very much more productivity.