Six Laptops That Don't Burn

digihome writes, "An exploding laptop can really ruin your weekend, so here's a review of six laptops that are unlikely to blow up." From the article: "We evaluated everything from battery and air vent temperatures, AC power draw and battery life to performance and price... What we found is that there's a real difference among those notebooks that know how to take the heat without sacrificing performance."

They forgot one!

[Salvance (1014001)]

Why not just buy one of the OLPC machines [wikipedia.org]? Price to performance and considering heat produced, nothing else can come close. I'm sure once Brazil and other countries start receiving theirs, we'll see them all over ebay for a bargain.

Seriously though, this is a great list, except for the fact that the machines are pretty expensive. If I was to blow that type of money on a laptop, I'd probably go for the Toshiba. But until then, I'll stick with my $500 Dell laptop. Sure it's a little bit slower (1.8Ghz I believe), but the battery is too small to catch anything on fire.

Re:They forgot one!

[sinij (911942)]

Imagine having to crank two things at once, your laptop and .... well you know.... heat generated by you will be quite considerable.

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[kcelery (410487)]

if you notice the C in OLPC, its not for adults.

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[Fred_A (10934)]

It's before you become an adult that your cranking is the most intense... Well usually, although I realise that this being /., your mileage may vary...

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[mspohr (589790)]

One of their criteria was "best performance for the buck" but they chose a bunch of expensive laptops.

My 1.7GHz Dell 700m barely gets warm even after prolonged use. The fan rarely even runs so I can't measure the "exhaust temperature". Battery life close to 3 hours (twice that with the big battery- NOT Sony). Also has dual display Intel chipset so I can run an external display for twice the desktop real estate. Cost was less than $1000.

Celsius v. Fahrenheit

[Z34107 (925136)]

Are you about to succumb to the elements, or do you live in France?

Is there a difference?

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[Grey Ninja (739021)]

You must be an American. Last I checked, you were one of a handful of countries who refused to adopt the metric system. Hell, even Britain uses it these days.

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[Starayo (989319)]

I find it amusing that America, whose citizens love to claim the best of everything, still use an outdated system of measurement.

Re:Celsius v. Fahrenheit

[GNious (953874)]

Drives American girls wild, when you tell them that you have got a 12 cm penis

Re:

[aplusjimages (939458)]

Is 12cm bad? Because mine was 11cm and I thought that was close to a foot. Am I wrong?

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[Guppy06 (410832)]

"Drives American girls wild,"

Inches, centimeters... US dollars have always been decimal.

Re:Celsius v. Fahrenheit

[orasio (188021)]

Base 10 is much easier than base 12.
I would understand a base 2 system.
We have one measure for distance.
The meter. km, cm, mm, micrometers are just a way to not use the zeroes. The unit is the same.
You have lots of different ways to measure stuff. I don't know how you can tell right away which is longer, two and a half feet, or 27 inches. 29 ounces or two pounds.
Celsius and Farenheit is not that much of a problem, aside fromt he fact that it makes more sense to use water than CO2 as the base of an imperfect system, but it makes more sense to have a scale that is based on ten, and has some coherence.

Re:

[empaler (130732)]

It's ~25 degrees i the rest of the world. Google is your friend [google.com]

Needless to say...

[by Anonymous Coward]

Sony's name isn't on the list.

Twinhead? Uh, no.

[Kris_J (10111)]

Any article that actually considers a laptop from Twinhead as a viable option loses all credibility, even if it does come last. They're junk. My most recent experience with a single Twinhead laptop involved two new hard drives, new RAM, a flakey power socket, a hinge that barely works and a battery pack with a failed cell (it splutters if you have the battery connected.) Prior experience involves machines that didn't come with the right bits and didn't recognise their own floppy drives.

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[presidentbeef (779674)]

My most recent experience with a single Twinhead laptop involved two new hard drives, new RAM, a flakey power socket, a hinge that barely works and a battery pack with a failed cell (it splutters if you have the battery connected.

But what about the heat output? The convenient volume control wheel on the front edge? The "magnesium screen lid and bottom case with an attractive finish that looks like carbon fiber"?!

You didn't address the important stuff!

:)

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[by Anonymous Coward]

I have to agree with parent post. Twinhead laptops are very disappointing. I own one and using it right now (model E14AL if you care) and only had problems with it. It killed two RAM in the first 3 months, then had to replace the motherboard, dvd drive died last month, plastic case is of very bad quality and get scratched very easily (can scratch it with your nails!), and now my the screen fixations are going away. After one year of use, I'm about to buy a new laptop, as I fear it's going to die soon and co

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[owlman17 (871857)]

I'm not too sure about the new Twinheads but my 1998 Twinhead was a workhorse. It was a P266 with 32MB RAM and a 3.2GB Hard Drive. It had Win98 and dual-booted into Mandrake 7.0. I used it primarily for programming. The battery died in 2001 and the CD-ROM drive in 2003. Otherwise, it was still going strong. It has endured a lot of (minor) falls. It wasn't until late last year till we put it out to pasture. We only did this because the LCD's hinges were starting to break off.

It was pretty strong for me and s

Page rendering sucks

[SwabTheDeck (1030520)]

Am I the only one getting this article rendered as though the CSS was written by throwing the keyboard down the stairs? (Firefox 2 on Linux)

Re:

[c_forq (924234)]

It is because the link is to the "printer friendly" version, if you go to the normal version it looks normal, but they do that annoying one-paragraph-per-page thing so it spans seven pages. Normal version here. [crn.com]

Danger

[cheese-cube (910830)]

Lithium fires like those that occur when a laptop battery explodes are extremely dangerous. Just watch this video [blogspot.com].

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[b0s0z0ku (752509)]

Lithium fires like those that occur when a laptop battery explodes are extremely dangerous. Just watch this video.

This video took about a minute from "smoking" to "apeshit." My laptop would be flying across the room by that point, no longer on my lap...

-b.

misleading summary

[cbc1920 (730236)]

I don't get how having a cool notebook translates into a battery that doesn't blow up. As far as I remember, the whole battery recall was because of a slight possibility of an internal short in LiIon cells. This had everything to do with manufacturing process and perhaps gravity, and nothing at all to do with the rest of the notebook. To suggest that these products avoided the recall because of their design is ignorant. They avoided the recall because they sourced different batteries.

Granted, a cooler notebook will result in longer batteries, since heat will reduce the effective capacity over time. That is the only advantage, from a power standpoint.

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[joshua.e.jacobs (1020074)]

I think the type of notebook does effect the chances of the battery burning. Toshiba said their notebooks don't have this problem despite using the same batteries because they're designed differently. Here's an article with a bit of info about the toshiba recall. http://www.csd.toshiba.com/cgi-bin/tais/su/su_sc_d tlView.jsp?soid=1501060 [toshiba.com]

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[msormune (808119)]

Well of course they will say that, it's very good advertising. "Look we made our laptops better, they won't burst into flames!". And if a Toshiba laptop bursts into flames, they will say "Well, we were wrong about the design just like everyone else, let's just make a recall like the others". Toshiba has nothing to lose.

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[Jeff DeMaagd (2015)]

Even a notebook of the notorious models had about a .00001% chance of blowing up, which is a pretty unlikely occurence.

Say no more, Panasonic Tough Book

[by Anonymous Coward]

I am already a big fan of Panasonic's Tough Book series. The fact that they earn high marks in yet another review, power consumption and heat dissipation, merely cements my opinion of them as a top choice notebook.

I would previously recommend ThinkPads, but even before moving to Levono the quality was waning. The only thing the ThinkPad has that is superior is a longer warranty. Always buy the longest extended warranty possible for a laptop if you actually take it back and forth to school or work. The failu

Re:

[b0s0z0ku (752509)]

I would previously recommend ThinkPads, but even before moving to Levono the quality was waning. The only thing the ThinkPad has that is superior is a longer warranty.

Just pick up a T23 or T41. Should run Linux fine and you'll pay under $300 used for the first, under $500 for the second on EBay. If it conks out, replace it with another $300 notebook.

-b.

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[astrashe (7452)]

I have a T21. $208. :)

I use FreeNX to pull up my home desktop, and it works beautifully.

I tried a Panasonic CFW4

[Rob Simpson (533360)]

It was a 12.1" one, compare to the 15" CF-51... despite the hard-drive supposedly being surrounded by the shock-absorbing protective stuff, even its seeks would send out shrill rattles amplified by the magnesium case. I didn't expect the optical drive on such a tiny laptop to be quiet, but the sheer grinding racket it made was alarming, not to mention painful. Thankfully, I wasn't dumb enough to buy a $3000 laptop from a place without a decent return policy.

The bigger laptop mentioned in the article migh

Dell XPS M1210

[NerveGas (168686)]

    Yeah, Dell has bad press lately. But that particular model uses a Samsung battery, not a Sony model. Very low draw, very good thermal characteristics. I've accidentally put it in my bag (which is a VERY snug fit) while running apps that kept it from entering standby several times - even after running in a sealed bag for a couple of hours, it's still running nice and solid. The bad and laptop were warm, but not at all hot. Having a Core Duo, 2 gigs of RAM, built-in mobile broadband, and still getting 5 hours of real-world runtime out of it are pretty nice, too.

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[kjart (941720)]

I've been looking at the M1210, but the one thing that has kept me away is the screen. I find high gloss LCD's to be fairly annoying in general and though I've never used one on an extended basis, the few times I have tried them I've found the glare to be overpowering. If the M1210 had an option without the glossy screen I'd probably already have one.

What is your experience with the m1210?

Toughbooks are SOLID!

[Doppler00 (534739)]

I've got a Toughbook tablet PC at work and I've got to say, it's an incredible machine (build wise). I've dropped it at least two times from table height onto a hard floor with just a small scratch in the corner. It's really hard to justify the price though. The only reason I needed it at work is because I mostly do field support of industrial control systems, and the 500 nits screen is much easier to read than the crummy 180 nits you find on most laptops. Oh, and the battery lasts about 5 hours to boot!

This wont burn...

[Anne_Nonymous (313852)]

This P-P-P-Powerbook [slashdot.org] won't burn [p-p-p-powerbook.com].

How accurate is /proc/acpi/battery?

[Jerf (17166)]

Does anyone know how accurate /proc/acpi/battery/BAT0/state is? The article talks approvingly about 22W of power, but my ACPI reports:

jerf@localhost ~ $ cat /proc/acpi/battery/BAT0/state
present: yes
capacity state: ok
charging state: discharging
present rate: 1239 mA
remaining capacity: 5708 mAh
present voltage: 12232 mV

which by my calculations is 15W. This is on my lowest display setting and an idle CPU, but no other extreme power saving efforts (hard disk spinning, wireless on, etc.)

Dell 5150

[clickclickdrone (964164)]

My 5150 has a classic design - the main air intake is underneath. When you put it on your lap, your legs cover the intake, the fan goes nuts and after a while the CPU and/or mobo does a meltdown. I'm on my 3rd mobo/cpu. Whenever you call with a hardware issue their first question is 'are all the rubber feet on?' because if they're not, you can bet its overheated jus sitting on a desk.
For good measure it also sucks up all the crud and deposits on to the heatsink/fan reducing their effectiveness.

It's scary

[clickclickdrone (964164)]

You'd expect an article headed 6 laptops that do burn not 6 that don't - like it's news some aren't going to explode.

The list of six:

[eples (239989)]

1. Panasonic Toughbook CF-51
2. Jetta Jetbook 9700P
3. Velocity NoteMagix L80
4. HP Compaq nw8440
5. Asus F3Jv
6. Twinhead Durabook D13RI

"Best" Choice: Panasonic's Toughbook CF-51

I think I'm safe...

[jridley (9305)]

since I don't even carry a battery in my laptop. After a couple of years I realized that I never use it when I'm not near an outlet anyway, so I just took it out and left it in the bag. I suppose it could burst into flames there...

Re:Am I supposed to be afraid of this?

[Jeremiah Cornelius (137)]

Smug are we? You didn't look into the battery recall then.

I remember the first Aluminium PowerBooks. They became so hot, that the bottoms expanded to a convex shape after an hour of running. They tottered, wobbled and turned about, like a Weeble [wikipedia.org]. This was really noticeable on the 12" models - where the footprint was so small, the curvature was really pronounced!

Now have the Sony exploding, flammable battery problem that Dell and Lenovo suffer from.

Re:Am I supposed to be afraid of this?

[Firehed (942385)]

I've asked the Apple 'Geniuses' about this on both a MacBook and MBP. While it wasn't *that* pronounced, both warped enough that they wouldn't sit flat on the table (notably worse on the MacBook). I don't know whether the MacBook was from heat or poor QC as it never got astonishingly hot during use, but I know it's heat related on my MBP, which I've seen report CPU temps upwards of 85c (where Applecare did absolutely nothing except replacing the main logic board with one that not only failed to fix the heat issue but started causing video corruption).

I'm not bashing Apple here - my old Gateway was almost as hot, and considerably louder (the fan was off-balance for most of its life; both very loud and almost always on since day one). As the MBP is often on a table it's not the end of the world, but Apple's engineers need to do some rethinking. I've also got a Thinkpad of nearly equal spec (almost identical to a MB except for the size, with over an hour more battery life) and it very rarely gets warm and the fan is never noticible. Apple genius's thoughts: "well, it's plastic, it won't heat up as much". Okay, well I guess IBM/Lenovo use a superplastic that dissipates heat better than aluminum... not even the copper heatsink section of the body gets warm, yet my MBP with plenty of metal surface area to dissipate that heat really roasts. Last I knew, added surface area for more heat dissipation meant a cooler system, but I guess IBM and Apple don't follow the laws of thermodynamics.

Translation: I still love my MBP (for the OS, not so much the hardware), but the Thinkpad (T60, if you care) runs very cool and has quite a bit of kick to it, with the main faults being a crappy display and Windows (unfortunately, OSx86 on it wasn't functional or reliable enough, or else it'd have been a best-of-both-worlds). For around $1100 I think (school paid for mine), it gives me a solid 5+ hours of battery life (it seems closer to 6 in Vista for some reason that escapes me) and no roasted legs. With a nicer, preferably widescreen, display, and OS X, I'd say it's pretty close to my ideal laptop. Except how the stupid black plastic gets laughably greasy if you ever handle the thing without wearing gloves. If Apple were to talk to the Thinkpad engineers to deal with their heat issues, they'd have a pretty nice system (as I doubt IBM/Lenovo talking to Apple about their choice of OS issue will get them anywhere). They certainly look pretty and OS X is the real reason to buy the thing, but Apple's portables really have a couple pretty inexcusable issues, most significantly heat (rounding the edges where your wrists tend to rest wouldn't get a "no" vote from me either).

Re:

[by Anonymous Coward]

Look into smcFanControl http://www.conscius.de/~eidac/software/page5/page5 .html [conscius.de]
Set it to something like 3000 rpm, which you can barely notice, and bam, cooler lap. Of course, this shouldn't be required, but until they get the heat issues sorted out...

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[Firehed (942385)]

Already using it (and it seems to have burnt out the GPU fan...) and while it's notably cooler, it's still scorching hot. That's to say, knocking 10c off of 85c still isn't great on the legs. Or the desk, for that matter. Even cranked all the way up to 6000RPM, it still tends to be worryingly toasty.

Maybe I'll do a real egg-cooking video with the thing and see if it catches the eye of any support persons. 85c is enough to cook meat thoroughly (albeit very slowly), but it's just not the same effect. As

It's because the masses buy laptops now...

[NotQuiteReal (608241)]

And "the masses" just want it to say "wide screen".

A "wide screen" must be better than ANYTHING in a old fashioned 4:3 ratio, right? That's Sooo 1990's!

Yeah, I liked my 1400x1050 screen too, but true hi-rez takes a back-seat to watching the latest video in the correct format...

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[Jerf (17166)]

They are hard to find, but it can be done.

You can customize a Dell E1505 right now with a 1680x1050 screen for well under $1000, though you'll probably want to bump that base model up a bit.

In previous months, I've seen it where if you pick the lowest model of the laptop at the customization screen, you won't be offered the higher screen res, but if you start with a higher base customization you will be offered better screens. This seems to come and go.

I have an earlier model of the E1505, called the "Inspi

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[skiflyer (716312)]

You've misconfigured your OS if higher resolution means smaller font size.... and in regards to photo/video... zoom in. Higher resolution means you have more to work with, not that everything is smaller. (1400x1050 in a 14.1" for the record.)

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[clickclickdrone (964164)]

>For us mortals, 800x600
Not for this one, 1600x1280 on a 15inch and wishing I had more. There's no such thing as too much screen real-estate.
Heck, I can't think of anything I could do at 800x600, I haven't had a PC at that res in the last ten+ years. Even my old Atari Falcon back in 1992 had 1024x800.

Mod parent down ...

[b0s0z0ku (752509)]

-1 Juvenile.

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[Lord Kano (13027)]

How funny is it that in a discussion about burning laptops, your post got modded "Flamebait"?

LK

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[tezbobobo (879983)]

Actualy, this is a very hot topic.