Warning about laptop use

[Marcus Telcontar]

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2002/11/22/1037697857595.html

[Gurney Devries]

Before I click the link: Does it have anything to do with men keeping it on their laps?

[Sejah Haversh]

Well, I'd like to point out that for the two years I used a laptop, it was frequently on my lap, and I suffered no such burns.

Perhaps he mistook a waffle iron for his laptop...

[Gurney Devries]

I've used some laptops that get quite hot. I can't keep them on my lap very long.

Alienware has a new laptop out which has a desktop 2.4ghz P4 in it. Not a special, laptop version of the P4, but the same one you'd use in a desktop PC. I hear it eats battery power like you wouldn't believe, and I'm certain it puts out enough heat to roast someone's nether regions.

Still, it looks pretty cool: http://www.alienware.com/main/system_pages/area51-m.asp

[Sanis Prent]

Honestly, how much trouble is it to add half an inch of high-performance insulation onto the base of those things. Everybody's all about "thin" and not about "common freakin sense"

[Lilaena De'Ville]

Its green! I love it!

Ok anyway. Yeah I never liked having my laptop on my lap for long, but I never...well, yeah it was never that hot. Like Sejah, never had any problems.

[Sigil Roland]

Common Sense would be me checking the Event Viewer in XP to see that the Time Sync is causing me to constantly restart my computer.... Long Story short, AGP is fun to install for the first time!

[Marcus Telcontar]

Honestly, how much trouble is it to add half an inch of high-performance insulation onto the base of those things

Then get a desktop. Ever lugged a high powered notebook on International flights? There's pretty damn good reasons you want them as light and thin as possible - its called not wanting to see a chiropractor. You lug a Inspirion 8100 across 10 flights in a week and then tell me then you'ld make it any heavier or thicker. You would be singing a vastly different tune.

[Sanis Prent]

Insulation is light, though.

That, and I'm not really all that put off by carrying a whole entire laptop. I don't think it will break me.

[Sigil Roland]

It doesn't matter, in a few years we'll be using Tablets as our Labtops and our Labtops as our Desktops. Face it with the size of the computers shrinking it's a wonder that none of the labtops have done this before. Anyway when dealing with a labtop try using a blanket or something to protect you from the heat.

[Ceres Duvall]

O_o Ouch. That must hurt! >.<

[Morgan Evanar]

It doesn't matter, in a few years we'll be using Tablets as our Labtops and our Labtops as our Desktops. Face it with the size of the computers shrinking it's a wonder that none of the labtops have done this before. Anyway when dealing with a labtop try using a blanket or something to protect you from the heat.

First - its laptop. Not labtop. The b and p keys are half a keyboard away. Things like this and "Athalon" (Its "Athlon") bug me. Nothing personal.

Second - PC makers are going to continue to adhere to standards. Desktop PCs aren't exactly shrinking a hury, its far cheaper to space out some componets than it is to make a heat management nightmare. Also, for the enthusast side of things, we like our 6 PCI slots and large midtowers.

The consumer PC space has been using microATX stuff for a while now. But I don't forsee that board format dying off anytime soon. There doesn't seem to be a clamor for it. You could make a PC quite small with an mATX board and some laptop optical drives, and still allow for full sized PCI and AGP cards. There is also the NLX format. You can do some seriously cool stuff like Shuttle's X-PC series. I'd prefer one of those instead of laptops if batteries were never an order of the day.

[Marcus Telcontar]

Laptops instead of Desktops?

No.

Laptops are compromised in size, power and packaging. Besides, tried to upgrade a laptop? Exercise in sheer bloody mindnes if you succeed.