2 laptops ago, I accidentally poured root beer in my laptop. It was never the same after that. I have no idea who got that one. The last one I had had a number of problems. Half the keys had the letters rubbed off. The monitor had a scratch in it. The thing overheated easily.
This laptop has some problems at this point, some student will be inheriting it in about a year. I've been trying to figure out for a couple of weeks what has been wrong with it. Performance just drops every once in a while. A couple of weeks ago, while playing age of empires, I monitored all kind of stuff trying to figure it out. After the game, I discovered that I had 50% fragmentation on my hard drive. That was fixed, but the problem there didn't go away, and I really had the problem in Linux as well.
Last night I figured out what was going on. When the fan came on, performance degraded. Badly. If the fan was not on, performance was ok. The fan would either come on right after booting up or never come on. (I had noticed it would occasionally start right when I booted up, and that it would run a long time, but I hadn't noticed that sometimes it really didn't start.)
Anyway, last night I downloaded a HW monitor for my windows partition. I figured it was lots easier to generate load and be able to see when performance went down if I was playing Age of Empires, plus it was an excuse to play Age of Empires. My laptop's performance went down any time the fans were running. When the fans were not running, the laptop overheated. Overheated as in the temperature of the graphics card went over 100 degrees C. (The boiling point of water, if you didn't know.) The laptop itself went over 85 degrees C. This is not a good thing. I could have performance, with a future meltdown, or fans, but no way to do anything.
Anyway, this morning, the laptop was cracked open. The fan was absolutely cakes in dust. Even after a good cleaning, the problem continued. I have a new video card and fan on the way from Dell, I hope that will fix things. In the meantime, I borrowed a cooling tower from someone, I have it turned to high, and my system temperature is sitting at 51 degrees C. My graphics card is at 59 degrees. If I start AoE, the thing will go pretty hot, but not necessarily meltdown hot.
What does this mean for the student that gets my laptop in a year? It means he or she will have a disk failure at some point. The only way around that is if the disk failure happens to me before the student gets it. That student might also have random hardware problems here and there that they can't explain. By then, I will have some brand spanking new laptop, and won't be giving this one a second thought. I have to decide in the next year if I want small laptop with a giant desktop, or a large laptop. (My guess is that I will stick to the big laptop.)
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