Since that time, I've handled many notebooks and enough of them have gone haywire enough to reignite my interest in desktops.
Notebook 1: IBM T20 refurb.
This notebook lasted exactly 4 months before both the power switch & screen went bad. The battery was down to 3 minutes on a full charge.
Notebook 2: Compaq R4000 new.
This unit survived until last summer, at which time the hard drive failed and then the board's power connector broke loose.
Notebook 3: Compaq V5000 new.
To it's credit, this notebook is still alive today but the battery is worthless. It's only problem is driver compatibility. Considering that this unit has a sticker proclaiming "Vista Capable", some of it's drivers are from the beta era of Vista and have never been updated. How nice.
Notebook 4: HP Pavilion DV2000 new.
This one is still running, but displays the excessive heat issues documented by HP for this model. According to them, it will likely fail at some point. The hard drive idles at 60C, just to give you an idea of the temps here....
Notebook 5: HP Pavilion DV6000 new.
Yet another model documented by HP to have heat issues, and it bricked itself on me last week. When I power on, the Quicklaunch lights come on but there is no hard drive activity and no screen. Swapping drives changed nothing.
Notebook 6: Compaq CQ50 new.
Within a week the wireless switch started working intermittently. Sometimes it would come on, sometimes not. At other times it shut itself off in the middle of something....
To sum it up, each newer notebook was cheaper than the one before it. Unless I have terrible luck with laptops, they are getting far too cheap to be of any real value. You can barely upgrade them to begin with, and the components you can don't make up for the disparity in performance.
These units rarely left the desk and were not carried to & fro. I always cleaned them to keep out the dust buildup, but I still had problems. The DV6000's failure was my breaking point, as it was my main unit and now I'm back on my ancient Socket A rig until such time that I do a teardown & rebuild.
I'm looking forward to converting the Socket A tower, moreso than any of my past notebook "upgrade" projects. Glad to be back on Motherboards.org and still seeing the same veterans on here.

As for my notebooks, they make handy doorstops..........

