[privacy] 93,754,333 Examples of Data Nonchalance

[Valdis.Kletnieks at vt.edu]

On Tue, 26 Sep 2006 10:58:26 PDT, Andrew said:

> Yikes - what brand and model so I can steer clear?

Dell Latitude C840 - it's actually held up quite well under 4 years of pretty
heavy abuse.  I replaced the hard drive a few months ago because it was
starting to develop bad blocks (many of those were self-inflicted - you do
enough kernel hacking, you end up resetting by nuking the power on occasion.
This gets you a runt block on the disk if a write was in progress, and once
in a while it became a permanent bad block that couldn't be rewritten).

I've also managed to wear out several sets of batteries in 4 years (doing
kernel compiles while on battery will do a good job of deep-draining them :).

The only other problem I've had was the cooling fan - it developed a bad
bearing.  Unfortunately, the 2 connectors for the wiring for the fans were
surface-mount soldered onto the motherboard - and came off entirely rather than
unplugging.  Would have been only 2 tear-downs (one actually) if I had just
said "screw it" and swapped the motherboard right off - but a serious attempt
was made to repair the motherboard - which generated several cycles of "Does it
work *now*?" (final count - 6 leads were broken, 5 were repaired, last one
evaded me though so we ended up swapping the motherboard).

Overall, I've been happy enough with this Dell that its replacement will likely
be another Dell Latitude  - the D820 is looking good....

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