Date: Wed, 1 Dec 2004 17:05:43 -0800 (PST) From: David Wolfskill <david@catwhisker.org> To: mobile@freebsd.org Subject: Susceptibility of Dell 8200 to thermal stress/fatigue? Message-ID: <200412020105.iB215hia004502@bunrab.catwhisker.org>
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My first laptop was a Compal N38W2 -- sold by various vendors under
different model names, but was very similar to the Inspiron 5000e.
After about 18 months of use, I found that it was suffering from
thermal stress, in part because there were springs (to force contact
between the CPU and the heat sink) on only 3 of the 4 screws. I
bandaged things together as best I could, and kept it going for
another 6 months, at which point it would not remain powered on for
very long at all.
I replaced it with a (used, but still under warranty) Dell i5000e
-- in large part because I could (and did) make use of the same
batteries and peripherals. (Except for the AC adapter. Dell uses
a grounded plug for the AC side, and a 3-pin connector on the DC
side, while the N38W2 uses only 2 connectors for each.)
That machine served for about 2 years, and now it, too, is showing
symptoms of thermal stress (or a crack in the system board) -- it
generally won't even light up the LCD display during the power-on
sequence before it shuts itself off, only to try again.... :-(
Some (sysadmin) colleagues have loaned me an underutilized laptop
of theirs, which I appreciate immensely. However, I'm finding that
certain of my approaches to doing things tended to take advantage
of the "screen real estate" I had available on the previous two
machines (SXGA+ -- 1400x1050 in each case). And I find that I'm
far more accustomed to using a touchpad than a trackpoint. :-{
Indeed, these are sufficient that despite our financial condition
(I live in the SF Bay area, which has been hit pretty hard by the
changes in the economy for the last couple of years), I'm looking to
get a replacement laptop that will enhance my productivity.
>From ads on craigslist and eBay, it looks to me as if a Dell 8200 with a
UXGA (1600x1200) screen ought to work out reasonably well -- better than
the laptops in Dell's current catalogue, in that of the latter, only one
has an integrated "standard" (for PCs) serial port. (As a sysadmin, I
sometimes need to connect to random devices that only talk serial.)
[Yes, I could get a USB<->DB9 dongle; that's one more thing to lose or
break, as well as pay for.] I don't really care about a disk drive, as
my old disk drive still works (I'm using it in the loaner laptop as I
type).
Now, it looks as if the Dell Latitude C840 is fairly similar to the
Inspiron 8200. As far as running FreEBSD on the machine, are there any
salient differences?
And does anyone have any ideas as to how susceptible either is to
thermal stress?
This comes into play because I keep a local copy of the FreeBSD CVS
repository on my laptop, updated daily, and have been tracking RELENG_4
as often as the corresponding working directory changed (usually,
daily). I had been tracking HEAD (on another slice) until RELENG_5 was
branched, and I then tracked RELENG_5. (I do have a slice for HEAD, but
2 buildworlds in a day was eating into my time a bit much; 3 just
wouldn't be feasible. I'll probably resume tracking HEAD once I migrate
my production machines at home to 5.x.)
(Yes, I am aware that some folks have encountered some challenges with
suspend/resume and with making the lid switch behave "properly." And
that I will probably be making the acquaintance of the NVidia driver in
ports.)
That last reminds me of another bit of workload for the machine -- a
daily "portupgrade -a".
Comments?
Thanks!
Peace,
david
--Peace,
david
--
David H. Wolfskill david@catwhisker.org
I resent spammers because spam is a DoS attack on my time.
See http://www.catwhisker.org/~david/publickey.gpg for public key.
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