In GQ because I’d like a list of models ideally (though perhaps this will be better in IMHO?)
I tried asking this on another forum, but without any useful answer so far. I’m trying to help my fiance pick out a new laptop after her old one died of overheating. It’s a two-year-old Sony Vaio (a VGN-FZ290), and unfortunately it’s impossible to reach the heatsink and clean it out, short of filleting the whole computer. To put that in context, I’m pretty comfortable taking just about anything apart (say, to solder in mod chips on a console), but I’ve done a few simpler repairs on that Vaio and it was hell to deal with.
Anyways, which recent laptop models can be relatively easily serviced? At the very least she wants access to the heatsinks to clean them out when they inevitably clog up again. My recommendation was some flavor of Thinkpad, but they’re expensive and ugly and short on multimedia features, so that didn’t fly with her. The budget isn’t too tight – $1000 is probably the upper limit, and that comfortably fits all of the mainstream notebooks out there.
Extra points if you have such a laptop, and can verify that there’s easy access to the cooling bits. (Online reviews are pretty useless here – at the best they might have a picture of the bottom, with access panels that may or may not be useful).
Dell posts service manuals for many (all?) of their laptops showing how to take the entire machine to bits. You might be able to tell how hard it would be to maintain the heat sink from looking through them. Start at support.dell.com and use the Manuals link on the left side. Use “Choose Model” since you won’t have a service tag at this point.
Yesterday I put an Acer Extensa EX5620-4025 back together after its owner’s dog tore out the power connector. This model Acer has a large removable panel screwed the bottom that reveals everything you might want to change: hard drive, memory, wireless LAN card, RTC battery, CPU fan, and heat sink. It was trivial to blow the dog hair out of the fan and heat sink fins with this panel off.
For the most part I get around this problem with a can of compressed air. The kind that comes with a long thin straw attachment. I can fish this in where the fan or vents are and shoot out quite a bit of dust.
Even then, your issue might not be dust. It may be a dying fan, bad sensor, bad components, etc that mimic a heat problem.
This isnt a conspiracy. It adds weight, size, and cost to add proper hinges and user servicable panels. On top of it, by the time a new CPU comes out thats worth having the socket has already changed. Not to mention you can spring for a decent video chipset when you buy it. Most user just wants bottom of the barrel 2d graphics and dont want to pay a 80-100 dollar premium on a nice 3D chip. Dont blame OEMs for that.
Echoing **icbm’s *experience, Dell and IBM/Lenovo are good at offering detailed instructions on how to dissect their laptops.
To be honest, much of it is nothing that someone who knows which end of a screwdriver to hold can’t figure out by just looking at the thing, but it is really nice to know which screws need to come out vs which ones can be left alone.
Really detailed. Be prepared for something like
Remove battery (p 4)
Remove lower case (p 16)
Disconnect wireless adapter antenna (p 37)
Remove wireless adapter card (p 18)
Disconnect modem cable (p 28)
and so on to peel back the layers of hardware between you and the heatsink and its fan.
ETA: A Viao? Oooh, I’m sorry. I’ve never heard anything good about working on any of Sony’s computers. They tend to give “quirky” a bad name.
The last laptop I liked working on was my G3 “WallStreet” PowerBook.
Flip back the keyboard and there was your RAM, your daughtercard (with CPU, upgradeable), your hard drive (likewise, plus you could add two more at the expense of your optical drive and your battery, if you so chose), and your cooling fans as well.
I wish I could say it was that wonderful Apple elegance and that all their laptops have been like that and of course still are, etc.
They aren’t . Swapping out the internal HD on my G4 PowerBook is definitely one of those “remove everything from the computer that is not the part you are trying to get to” exercises in annoyance and frustration. With lotsa tiny screws. Including some that are about 0.3 mm tall and have to slide in right next to a rather strong freaking magnet.
Thanks for the input. She ended up settling on a HP Elitebook 6930p – turns out all of HP’s business lines also have nice part-by-part service manuals.
Also, I should give credit where it’s due… She can take fiddly electronics apart just fine, and in a last-ditch attempt to fix her vaio, just took it apart and managed to remove a nice layer of dust/felt from the heatsink. It helps… a bit. It now crashes about twenty minutes after starting up, rather than five minutes.
Some laptops a few years ago used regular desktop style CPUs in them for better performance. These laptops tended to die an early death from overheating. These days, the specialized low power laptop CPUs perform a lot better and using a hot CPU in a laptop seems to be a bit less common. Still, you need to worry about the heat.
When you are comparing laptops, in addition to looking at the CPU speed, number of cores, etc. look at what CPU they are using and how much heat it generates (look at the power consumption in watts). Not only do the higher power ones reduce your battery life, but they tend to die younger too.
What is a really big PITA with dis-assembling re-assembling current notebooks and is typically not addressed in the technical manual instructions is that a LOT of the body components are clipped into each other, and it’s sometimes a near thing of much force to apply to get these various bezels to release vs snapping them in two.
. Swapping out the internal HD on my G4 PowerBook is definitely one of those “remove everything from the computer that is not the part you are trying to get to” exercises in annoyance and frustration. With lotsa tiny screws. Including some that are about 0.3 mm tall and have to slide in right next to a rather strong freaking magnet.