Re: [LAU] pd, linux, graphics hardware.

Mark Knecht wrote: 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.) Still, they say the average laptop's lifespan is 18 months. -- David gnome(a)hawaii.rr.com authenticity, honesty, community