Are Laptop Batteries Supposed To Squeak?
My Vaio Z1XMP is approaching its fourth birthday, but sadly it doesn't look like it'll make it.
Over those four years it has picked up its fair share of minor blemishes - the plastic wrist rest area has come away, the screen has been pressed too hard at some point, so isn't a consistent brightness. Little things, like the broken space bar spring. Then there were the inherent problems, like lack of CPU power or lack of screen brightness when on battery. Or that it gets so hot it actually burns my legs if I don't put it on a table. Or - and this is my personal favourite - that I become electrically charged and can continuously electrocute people while I have the laptop on my lap. These are problems, to be true, but nothing I can't work around, and nothing serious enough to warrant replacing it.
The first real problem I faced about 8 months ago was lack of ram. I upgraded to 1GB, which helped, but I need to run 4 linux VMs at the same time as Flash, Word and five browsers; 1GB doesn't cut it. The machine often spends half its time writing swap and churning the hard drive.
Which was the next problem. The hard drive started clicking gently about 6 months ago, and is now clicking a bit more each day. Only a matter of time.
Then there is the power cable, which I think is broken. In certain positions it works fine; the rest of the time, my laptop swaps between battery and cpu about 10 times a second. I'm sure it's not helping the battery.
Ah, yes. The battery. All of those problems I would be happy to overlook, if it wasn't for the battery.
It squeaks.
There's no other way to describe it; I noticed that while it's charging, it has started squeaking intermittently; it'll squeak every ~750ms for about 10 seconds, then go quiet again. Then start up again. And the other day when I turned it off, it continued squeaking. For about a minute.
I think that's a bad thing. Like a "the lithium cells are doing stuff they shouldn't be doing, like expanding and contracting, and one of these days they're going to expand too much and explode, raining burning laptop bits down upon me, and setting fire to the train in the process" bad thing.
Add it all up, and I think there's only one option: get a new laptop. Now I just have to decide which one. I want something powerful but fairly light, so it's currently between a Dell XPS M1330, a Toshiba Portege R500 (although they've had mixed reviews), and *gasp* a Macbook Pro (it's ok, you can run windows on them). Any comments or suggestions?
Comments
An EeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeePC. Obviously.
That or a thinkpad. I really like them, especially the old ones before they got 'lenovoed'. Expensive I hear though...
The EeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeePC looks nice, but more as a toy than your main machine to work on for several days a week.
Thinkpads are kinda expensive, and they look ugly. And have those stupid nipple things. And the ones that have the features I'm after are kinda heavy. But yes, good machines; worth considering.
Mac Book Pro. For a developer being able to run both OSes natively would seem to be a God-send... and MacOS really is much nicer to use. I'm about to get a Mac Book Pro myself. Now you can run Windows applications in MacOS and it looks like it is runing natively, which is nice if you want to use MacOS as your main system.
Mmm, that's kinda what I'm thinking - I need to get a mac for development purposes, so two birds one stone and all that. Although I'd be paying the apple tax, I'd probably save overall.
The main reason I didn't consider one in the past was that I need a lot of windows software, but being able to dual boot for games and run applications natively has almost sold it to me. Almost.
But the pro is relatively heavy, non-pro not much lighter but underpowered, and air pretty much useless. And they all only have one mouse button.
My mate has an eee and they are very nice machines for the money.
I used to use Macs daily years ago and still have a hankering for a return to macos, which is more palletable now thanks to being able to run windows nativaly on their machines.
You pay a lot of money to only get one mouse button in a Mac...
Aye - I think that would get on my nerves.
That's like not leaving Acorn to move to the PC, as Acorns require THREE mouse buttons... it would be a totally insane and somewhat French thing to consider.
If I was going to move to OS X then I'd agree, but if I did buy a mac, I'd have to run certain Windows applications on it; I can't transfer the licenses to OS X, and don't want to have to buy them again (would double the cost).
In that sense, it's more like trying to use RISC OS on a Windows laptop: all 3 buttons would be quite critical, but the laptop would only have two. Sure, you can press both buttons at the same time to simulate the third button, but that seems to go wrong as often as it goes right.
Although I'm sure one button makes perfect sense in OS X, I can't help feeling that it would be a right pain in Windows, especially when you need a third button on occasion. Plugging in an external mouse would work, but it isn't always going to be an option.
I agree that it seems a bit extreme to disregard an entire range of machines just because they're one mouse button short, but usability for my common tasks has to be a major consideration.
The question has to be: will the overall experience the macbook gives me be as good or better when running windows apps, compared to the other laptops I'm considering. Although the nice magnetic power cable would be nice, and having OS X would be a bonus, I'd find it hard to justify buying for style over function.
You can configure Macs to have two mouse buttons, despite there only being one mechanical blob.
I've read that you can hold a control button, or use two fingers on the trackpad; guess that would be ok? Aww, I thought I'd managed to cross at least one option off the list!
It *will* eat you. Then it *will* raid your bank account and wire all your money directly to the California mafia. Then there *will* be a big shootout and the mafia *will* come looking for you wanting more.
And all you'll have to defend yourself with is the fact that you can use two fingers at once on the trackpad to simulate a right click. You *will* lose.
Squeaky goodness! I have a feeling I'll be reading the news soon and see an article about a Viao laptop exploding on a train to London. Good luck!
Thanks! It hasn't done it for a couple of days now, so I'm --kidding myself-- hopeful that it's better now!
Oooh, Lenovo X300 looks nice...
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