On Thu, Mar 20, 2014 at 3:03 PM, Mike McGinn <mikemcg...@mcginnweb.net>wrote:
> When the hinges went on my Toshiba I was able to attach a small piece of > metal > to the back to hold the screen up. Got another two years out of it. > The hinges seem to be a consistent weak point on these machines. My boyfriend had a Satellite (can't recall the exact model, but general construction and feature set was consistent with what folks would generally consider a premium home laptop). Well, his sister's kid pulled it off a table when he was loaning it to his sister, and the hinges came apart at the spot welds, and again physically snapped across a die cast piece (in much the same way that various components on Huffy bicycles are prone to failure after roughly 50 miles of wear). Given I replace parts on and install pretty much any laptop, desktop, server, SAN system in existence at this point, had him order the lid plastics and the hinges and said I'd do the swap-out. Well, I spend the better part of a Friday night carefully trying to untangle the (miraculously undamaged) LCD panel and fish out the screws I would need to reassemble the display assembly with the replacement parts, and finally got everything back together and working after about 3 or 4 hours (probably would have been faster but I don't usually dissect Toshibas, the service manual wasn't publicly available and someone showed up with pizza and Maker's Mark). Strange thing is, about six weeks later, the new parts failed in almost exactly the same fashion, this time while the machine was in it's sleeve, in a padded backpack. By this point, I had a Lenovo ThinkPad T400 I no longer used (replaced by a Toshiba Satellite C555D that I ended up pawning off for about what I bought it for, see below; and then by a Lenovo IdeaPad N586, whose only real issues are I would love to replace this gloss finish LCD panel with a matte finish one, and really...really miss having a ThinkPoint instead of a touchpad now that I realize why I freaking hate touch-pads so much again), so I handed it down to him. The ThinkPad's been in two countries, 30 states, and traveled by motor-scooter, bicycle, train, bus, plane and car many times with minimal protection and been jostled around, and the only thing wrong with it is there's a chip out of the back right corner of the case where I accidentally dropped it out the door of the Eugene EmX as the doors were closing and it hit the concrete. It was still running (albeit closed and laying on it's lid) when I finally got on an EmX going the other direction to retrieve it... As for my C555D...what a ball of hate that thing was trying to get Debian on it. And it still had weird, intermittent issues with video, audio, the touchpad, and the wifi adapter that just weren't reproducible under Windows. So I ultimately gave up on constantly debugging and troubleshooting that POS and sold it for about $50 less than I paid for it after just three months, turned around and bought the IdeaPad N586 from the Lenovo Outlet for the same money. Turns out that was a much better plan. All in all, unless you want to try reverse engineering weird, not-quite-what-it-claims-to-be hardware to make it work under Linux better, by all means, go with Toshiba. But for everyone else, Toshiba and HP are two brands best avoided.
