Here I am again with another computer rant. In my experience it seems older computers last longer than newer computers. I only use Laptops. I prefer Laptops with giant screens and the numeric keypad. By coincidence they are all HP. The Older HPs have not failed, but the newer ones have a variety of problems. They have either died or are about to die. I am not interested in hearing Morse Code when powering on a computer. Is this a quality issue with HP, or with any Laptop? Also I am not interested in disposable computers.

I have Air Conditioning, Fans, and Crates, to assist the cooling of these laptops. (Assuming overheating causes failure). The laptops are next to each other. They should be the same temperature! Examining the inside but there is no dust. However, the fan DOES increase speed. Other laptops fans do not increase speed, and then they eventually have issues and die. I still assume something is wrong with the laptop that does have a high temperature and high fans. Another is a laptop screen failure. It will not function unless striking the top of it (similar to Onslow's television from Keeping Up Appearances). The screen malfunctions whenever moving the position of the screen, or "the lid" of the laptop. Perhaps it is GPU failure. The recent computer that died I had set to "Turn Off Monitor: Never" but it kept turning it off.

I do not want to by any more rubbish ever again.

I want something that does not even need a fan, which would be The ARM Processor. Unfortunately no laptop exists except for silly little Netbooks (as I said before, I like giant screens and numeric keypads) and with only Linux or Google Chrome OS (which is probably Linux) as Microsoft appears to have scrapped its plans to support ARM Laptops.


ARM is always available for Tablet, and "Phones". These are not what I consider computers, but "Social Media" toys. I hate Social Media and one of the reasons why I hate Social Media is because it involves spending unnecessary time on a computer. But computers are very convenient, especially for Films and Episodes and BigRigTravels ... I remember the years lost from VHS which is poor quality. So as much as I appreciate improvements with technology, there are interfaces and hardware that are low quality (unless there are some exist that I do not know about.) It seems that a durable hardware has horrible touch screen interface which is meant to be discarded during the next version of "SnapChat". If fortunate, you can find Tablet with USB that can use the external Keyboard and Mouse but is not intended for such because they have On Screen Keyboard filling the already tiny screen.

In future, it seems the best option is for me to join Morph and design a high quality laptop for MorphOS. I do not know which new Desktop and Laptop that The New MorphOS will be supported since there seems to be junk hardware exist today. Or am I just having terrible luck with computers??

Computers have terrible luck with you.

Update: I had also a HP that the hard drive was broken. I attempted to get recovery media directly from HP. One of the discs that they sent was also corrupt. So it is a computer with no hard drive.

I took the hard drive out of the computer that malfunctioned and placed inside the laptop that needed a hard drive.

Everything appears to function properly.

Curiously this laptop has only one RAM slot, meaning that it has a 4GB in it. The other laptop has 6GB but it is from a 4GB module and a 2GB module. So with that set up I have lost 2GB of RAM but there is not much difference in performance.

I have noticed that the laptops that have malfunctioned severely (an unknown hardware issue) are made of metal. The others that appear to live much longer are laptops made of plastic. The laptop that died recently was made of metal and I placed its hard drive inside plastic laptop.

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If you think you can run ARM without a fan, you may be disappointed. Chromebooks all have fans.

The low power ARM that aren't fast enough for laptop usage are in smart phones and tablets, and so are meant especially for social media usage because they aren't really powerful enough to do much else.

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Hardware has never given so much for so little for so little cost than it does now. So yes, I guess you are.

I would suggest that you consider getting yourself the most powerful tiny ARM board, like the Raspberry Pi 3, or better, and just connecting it to what ever HDMI compatible display you happen to in the room you find yourself in. That way, you get something easy to take with you (like a Laptop), that has a large screen (assuming that you will plug it into a TV set where ever you are), and the only other item needed to fit your requirements would be to take a keyboard and mouse with you, one that has the number pad you require.

You could make yourself a case designed to carry the keyboard, mouse, and ARM board (in its custom case), along with the required cables for power and HDMI and maybe an HDMI to DVI or HDMI to Composite adapters, to give you more options for what monitors/TV's you could plug into. Such a carrying case would be a little smaller and lighter than your current monster laptops, and the most powerful ARM based boards these days are very capable at running the latest version of Android, plus any Linux distro's, and some even claim to run Windows 10.

When my 17" Dell i7 laptop dies, I may consider doing the above, instead of buying another 17" laptop (if any are even available anymore, in a year or two).

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Actually, there are fanless Chromebooks out there. Both with Intel (!) and ARM processors.

(Apple´s current generation 12 inch Macbook is fanless as well, but costs substantially more than any CHromebook except for Google´s Chromebook Pixel.)

> the most powerful ARM based boards these days are very capable at running the latest
> version of Android, plus any Linux distro's, and some even claim to run Windows 10.

Windows 10 is not ARM-compatible, but Windows 10 Mobile is (albeit currently only available for 32-bit ARM).

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I guess he was refering to Windows 10 IoT (Internet of Things) for ARM devices boards such as Raspberry Pi.

https://developer.microsoft.com/fr-fr/windows/iot/Explore/IoTCore.htm

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Why wouldn´t they? You can even buy fairly inexpensive 20 inch tablets these days, which should be suitable enough for In_Correct´s entertainment purposes as well.

> I guess he was refering to Windows 10 IoT (Internet of Things) for
> ARM devices boards such as Raspberry Pi.

Ah yes, thanks for the pointer. Interestingly, Windows 10 IoT seems to have the same limitation as Windows 10 Mobile in that on 64-bit ARM CPUs it runs only in 32-bit mode.

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Does this hardware last a very long time?

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This sounds perfect!! And as much as I keep recommending Raspberry Pi, for some reason I still have yet to buy one.

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I prefer if 20" tablets come with Docking Stations (which would include things such as Ethernet, USB, keyboard, and track pad. When docked, the tablet looks like a monster laptop.) But then I would have to get used to silly Android. I was able to reverse the "modernization" of Windows but I do not know how to reverse with Android. It is probably impossible to make Android's "Home" look like a 1990s desktop. Even if impossible I guess they have more software than Windows.

I could rebel and get BlackBerry PlayBook also, but they are not made now.

A 20 Inch Tablet should also be able to mount on wall, function as "television", and accessed with a blue tooh keyboard and mouse.

A second option could be a projector connected to Pi Device. ?

[ Edited by In_Correct 19.08.2016 - 12:41 ]

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What are you waiting for? It can't be the cost. I am a big fan of the Raspberry Pi, and their aim towards education, so I see it as a "Win + Win" situation, when I buy any of their boards. I get a very useful and cool tiny computer that is supported by tens of thousands of people creating new projects or new uses for them, and I also get to support a company that in turn support education, which I wish to support in as many ways as I can. I only hope that some day education will become a higher priority for everyone, and good teachers will get more pay, that they surely deserve, as well as education becoming freely available to everyone equally, all around the world.

@Zylsea & In_Correct,

The idea to use a 20" tablet is not a bad solution, but for portability, I would still prefer a small device, like the Raspberry Pi 3, with bluetooth keyboard & mouse, and a HDMI cable to connect it to what ever monitor/TV is available at my destinations. The tablet has the advantage that it can be used while in transit, if you are traveling by plane, train, or bus, or if someone else is doing the driving in a car. Americans unfortunately don't have as many trains to travel on, like Europeans, and some other countries have. I love traveling by train, and have taken the slow train ride from Southern Calif. to Northern Calif., or the reverse, a couple of times this year.

I personally dislike the touchscreen interface of any OS on a tablet, but I am sure that could be resolved when using the bluetooth keyboard & mouse, and tweaking the gui and input options.

[ Edited by amigadave 19.08.2016 - 13:10 ]

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I bought the x86 desktop I have six years ago. Have upgraded it once with a higher end graphics card. Can still play all the newest games in 4k. My netbook is seven years old, pretty slow now but good enough for Linux. My Pegasos, purchased in 2003, is still in perfect working order 13 years later. My parents still use the laptop I bought in 2005.

So yes, it lasts a very long time. Ironically longer than any of my Amiga stuff ever did.

[ Edited by KennyR 19.08.2016 - 23:16 ]

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You are describing so-called "portable all-in-one" computers such as the Acer & ASUS Portable AiO desktops, Dell XPS 18, Lenovo Horizon, and so on.

They all include Windows 10 (or 8.1 if it is an older machine), and likely work with some Linux distributions as well.

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You must have been very hard on your "Amiga stuff", or were just unlucky, as I, and many others, still have 20 year old and nearly 20 year old Amiga gear that still works great. I still own the first A1000 I purchased used in 1987, and have found Commodore Amiga computers to be very reliable for long term use. Many other users have reported running Amiga computers for in excess of 12 months, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and others have reported running an Amiga 24/7 for months, without even needing a reboot.

I've never been so lucky with any Windows system, to use it even one week, without needing to reboot, for one reason or another.

Of course, this all depends on what you are running, and many Amiga games and some of its programs, due to the available documentation on how to "Hit the Hardware" directly, were coded poorly, and abused the OS, causing crashes, or lockups to occur for some people, more often than others, but that has nothing to do with the hardware reliability.

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You're in the minority then I'm afraid. Late 90s Amiga users abandoned their systems because they were A1200 frankenmachines held together with duct tape and cable ties, with accelerators wedged onto places they shouldn't be or in places like the trapdoor slot where they had insufficient cooling -- some of them (looking at you, BPPC) required you to turn the computer on and off again just to get them to kick in. The power supplies after A500 were seriously shortchanged, prone to failure if you so much as added a hard drive.

Big box machines weren't much better. They just got harder and harder to boot without pulling all the Zorro cards and blowing on their interfaces until the machine recognised them, more add-on than original board.

2.5" IDE cables could fry your computer if you lined up one pin wrong, clock batteries frequently leaked, clockport (which wasn't designed for what it was used for) could end up with broken pins, PCMCIA slot pins bent on a sneeze. Scandoublers hung out of RGB ports. Parts hung off boards, with no offical way to secure them. Even the mouse ports needed converters hanging out just to use industry standard PS2 or USB mice.

With computer hardware these days, I don't even need to use a screwdriver, and if I ever throw anything out it's almost always because it has become obsolete, not because it is broken. All cables are designed so they can't be inserted wrongly, SATA needs no jumpers or settings.

80s hardware was glitchy crap wrapped up in yellowing plastic.

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Which probably says more about you than it does about Windows, to be honest. From XP onward, discounting security updates, if you didn't have uptimes of months you were probably doing something very wrong or just turning it off all the time. On my current computer I almost never reboot the thing: it just gets hibernated when not in use. It never, ever crashes.

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AmigaOS in the late 90s was an 80s operating system that had to have a hundred different competing patches to get expected functionality out of it or to fix longstanding bugs. It wasn't uncommon to have Amiga systems that had to soft-reboot at least once after patching and re-locating the ROM, or had to have the users manually reboot a failed boot because some hacked-in component or other didn't respond that actual time - or because some spliced cable had fallen out because you had the temerity to walk past it too roughly.

As I wrote earlier, you were very hard on your Amiga gear. Most of what you just wrote are problems caused by user error, both in hardware configuration and software, in the way of OS patches, which is some cases added needed functions, but in other ways introduced less reliability. That is a user choice to use a flaky patch to the OS, not the fault of the manufacturer of the "80's system" that the user is trying to make behave like a "90's" or later system.

The fact that the A1200 was the most popular Amiga model for users where you live to purchase and modify far beyond their original configuration, with add-ons that often were not mounted or secured properly, is not the fault of the manufacturer either, and your comment about Zorro cards having so much trouble being recognized is a total exaggeration of a rare problem, unless the particular Zorro card you were trying to use was at fault due to poor quality of materials, or design, or it being recognized is compromised by the many OS patch files being used.

This is a pointless argument, and I doubt you are going to admit the obvious fact that the Amiga hardware is more reliable than most systems of today, simply because it was less complex, produced less heat (heat that can sometimes cause problems and failures), and the tiny footprint of the code to run an Amiga makes for a smaller opportunity that the OS will cause faults, compared to the millions of lines of code required to run a modern computer, and the wider number of programs and utilities that modern computers run, all of which add layers of complexity, and potential for errors, or faults due to conflicts between one component and another.

I just objected to your comment the way it was worded, as it seemed to me to imply that Amiga gear was lower quality, or badly designed, which made it more prone to failures, which I disagree with. I believe that the quality of manufacturing and the design of the hardware, was about the same as most hardware today, if not a bit better, and the simplicity of the Amiga made it naturally more reliable, and definitely easier to maintain, than any modern system today. Pushing the Amiga gear to do things it was not originally intended to do, introduced increasing levels of unreliability, depending on what "improvements" were attempted, and what new uses were added, to a basically very simple system.

Yes, the Amiga has its faults, and some of the attempts to correct those faults were successful, but the success was accompanied by the introduction of less reliability. It could be said that the more a user added to an Amiga, both in hardware and software/OS patches, the more unreliable the Amiga would become, but only the most extreme add-on hardware actually would cause the original Amiga hardware to fail more often. Over loading a PSU is certainly not the fault of the Amiga.

Amiga users where I live mostly used big box Amiga computers, and usually only added accelerators and graphic cards to their systems, which rarely had the number, or frequency of failures you seem to imply were suffered by all Amiga users.

Edit: The most common design problem I found with an Amiga, was the problem of socketed chips sometimes working their way loose, due to repeated heat & cooling cycles, and the fix was just as simple. Open the Amiga up and press down to re-seat all the socketed chips, close the case back up, and turn it on.

That problem was shared by almost all computers designed and manufactured at that time, so it was not unique to the Amiga.

[ Edited by amigadave 21.08.2016 - 12:08 ]

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No. I wasn't.

Kenny, you've just described my Amiga experience...

Personally, my experience has been that hardware become less reliable.
But I would blame that on material quality and the quality of manufacturing.
Most production these days is done in China, and the quality of the good definately needs improvement.

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You may find your experience apocryphal and based more on nostalgia than fact. Not only does modern hardware need to be certified in an increasing number of regulatory requirements (including, in the EU, as much as a five year warranty), it's pretty well established statistically that modern electronics have a much greater usage life than ever before. Whether it comes from China or not, if they want to sell it worldwide, they have to jump through the European hoops - and the EU want to stop dumping electronics, and that means most robust computers.

That said, as soon as something is given moving parts such as a fan, its working life dramatically decreases. So too for parts that operate over 50C. It was difficult to find anything that powerful 30 years ago.

Edit: The thing I find that fails most is power supplies. SMP has never been as robust as copper wire transformer bricks. However, having had one C64 and two Amiga power supplies fail, this is far from a huge difference.

[ Edited by KennyR 24.08.2016 - 22:12 ]

That is an interesting use for the word apocryphal.
The opinion is actual just anecdotal.

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I suppose either word would do depending on the context. An opinion could be based on anecdote; while a popular conception (i.e. the one held by the Amiga community that Amiga hardware was exceptional in any way, or similar nostalgic bias) would be apocryphal: "well-known but probably not true".

I'm a bit over-sensitive to the latter, especially considering OP. It's not aimed at you, so I'm sorry if I sound sharp. Just ignore me.