[LAU] pd, linux, graphics hardware.

[Ken Restivo]

On Fri, May 09, 2008 at 09:55:18AM -1000, david wrote:
> Mark Knecht wrote:
> > On Thu, May 8, 2008 at 10:05 PM, naysayer <gateswideopen at gmail.com> wrote:
> >> hey crew.
> >>
> >> i know this is a really boring topic but i'm in that horrid world of needing
> >> a new laptop.(current one died) call me old fashioned but 3 years is really
> >> not that long for the life of a PC. grrrr.
> >>
> > 
> > Mine died this week and it's only 10 months old. Only good thing to
> > say about that is that I did good backups and it's still under
> > warranty. I agree. These things don't last, especially laptops.
> 
> Hmmm, my current Toshiba laptop is 3.5 years old and got hauled around 
> Europe a few months after we bought it. My wife's previous Toshiba 
> laptop was 3-4 years old when she slammed a hinge of the screen into the 
> edge of her desk and broke it - outside of that, it was still working 
> fine. Her previous laptop was a Sony Vaio Superslim Pro, and it lasted 
> for years and years before it simply wouldn't boot up anymore. And we 
> bought the Superslim Pro for her because a friend of ours was using one 
> - he carried it around during his busy day just like a book (never used 
> a case, would just toss it into the trunk of his car, etc) - and his 
> lasted 3 years. Finally, our daughter just now replaced her very used 
> Dell Lattitude 600 which was three years old when we bought it used in 
> 2005 from a former employer of mine - so it was 5 years old when her 
> fiance bought her a desktop PC as a wedding present to replace it. (Her 
> laptop still works.)
> 
> Then, on the other end of the scale, a friend bought a high-end Dell 
> laptop five years ago. It has a 3GHz Pentium 4 processor in it. During 
> the first month, the hard drive died. A few months after he got it back 
> from them, the processor died. During the last month of the warranty, 
> the processor died again, this time taking the motherboard with it. (The 
> problem was poorly-designed ventilation - the design had been for a 
> slower processor and Dell had simply stuck the faster processor into the 
> old design.)
> 

I had a Sony Vaio that I got 5 years of use out of. The hinge on the lid broke on it after about a year, but I knew a good welding guy and be brazed it, and it never broke again. I really babied that thing though.

I then got another, newer Vaio which lost its hinge within a few weeks, but which I again took to a welding shop to fix. It lasted for a couple years until I wanted to get into music stuff and had to get something more powerful.

I also had an old ThinkPad 600E that was like a tank, and I beat the crap out of it, used it outdoors, got it full of sand, carried it in backpacks, etc, and it still lasted a few years before dying. I'd earlier tried to replace it with another ThinkPad but my daughter spilled water on it and that was the end of that.

Someone once gave me an old Compaq Presario laptop too which wouldn't boot off of its hard drive; I booted a tiny USB Linux distro on it and kept it going as a VNC terminal for 4 years. I got my daughter a new-ish Compaq laptop that someone had dropped and chipped the case on; the previous owner replaced the hard drive and so far it's going strong.

I'm trying to baby this new Asus and I hope I get at least a few years out of it.  I do sweat quite a bit when gigging though. I'm keenly aware that, one pull on the wrong cable during, before, or after a show, and that'll probably be the end of it. I'm starting to play on the beach a lot, and I know I'm living dangerously.

I'm seriously considering downloading a 64studio or UbuntuStudio liveCD and keeping it around, just in case I find myself hurriedly borrowing someone's laptop in order to make a show.

This is also why I've asked on this list about perhaps using one of the new Linux phones or game consoles for running Fluidsynth and some LADSPA plugins. Being able to do a gig with just my MIDI controller, a little handheld Linux device, and an external USB audio interface, would save lots of wear and tear on the laptop.

-ken