Laptop boot fault after flat battery

[pman92]

I've got a Lenovo Y560 which I don't use anymore, would have to be 6 or 7 years old.
About 2 years ago (this is when I stopped using it) it started booting up to a black screen and fan running flat out.
GPU was getting red hot and I tried everything, cleaned out all the dust (which I done regularly anyway) and put fresh heat sync compound in etc.
In the end the only way it would work is if I disabled the GPU and used the onboard graphics. Even then GPU was still cooking.
I decided the GPU was toast and used it for a while with low res graphics before putting it in the cubbord where it still is today.
I guess it did pretty good for 4 or 5 years of service before packing up. The battery was knackered by then anyway.

If Acer are no good, what do people think is the better brands when it comes to laptops?

[Tazzi]

I have literally never had a major problem with Toshiba's.

Have had issues with Acer, HP and Dell in the past.

[Gareth]

I have literally never had a major problem with Toshiba's.

Agree with that, my poor Toshiba laptop that came with the dyno has had a heavy workout and still goes strong, got bathed with red hot coolant from a shit box speedway car that blew a radiator hose whilst on the dyno, I have a pic some where of me draining the water from it

[antus]

I had a good run with old toshiba, but the newer consumer grade stuff isnt so good. However that is true of most of the manufacturers. Asus do have pretty good quality standards, but in general the consumer grade stuff is not the same quality as the business grade stuff. If the laptop manufacturers sold 1000 units to a corporate customer and had the same fault rate as the junk they sell to consumers they'd be in trouble.

We have many lenovos at my work, they do seem to be pretty good. My wife has HP business class laptops and they seem good also.

But my cousin bought a $400 consumer grade laptop about 2 years ago and its dead already. While it was working is was super slow. It had 2G of ram, an emmc 'hard drive' which was actually sdcard style electronics on board of something like 32G. Very small and slow. And a low end processor that would have been slow in 2005. They were going to buy another for $400 but fortunately this time asked me. I asked if they were open to second hand and recommended an older business desktop pc. They picked up a dell with an older core I5, genuine 4 core processor (8 core logical), Intel 128G SSD, 8Gb ram and official windows 10 upgrade installed by the vendor for $300. (they already had a 24" monitor from xboxing in the past). I reckon the seller is buying them from the auctions in bulk and re-imaging them. Its turned out way way way way way faster than what they had before. Its old, so im not sure exactly how long its gonna last, but I reckon its got better chances than the new low end junk they were considering.

[Dylan]

What would a business grade laptop be? Are they available to the public? Harvey Norman etc?

[psyolent]

Macbook Pro. Business grade laptop. Aluminium unibody. Awesome machines. Come with a pricetag tho. my 17" MBP is still going, I had to replace the swelling battery about 8 weeks ago as it swelled so much the track pad stopped working LOL. i'm typing this on a 2011 13" MBP upgraded to 8GB RAM and 250GB SSD. still going strong. no replacement battery touch wood.
failing that. Panasonic Toughbook. not sure if they still make them. Telstra road techos have them, almost indestructible.
I had a good run with the Toshiba Satellite Pro in the 90's and the Dell Latitude (business spec) in the noughties. Good machines. Not so sure about the Dells of nowadays.

[MAGP]

They still make Toughbooks but they aren't what they used to be. I have an old Mark 4 CF-29 and it's a ripper. Needs a new battery but it can wait till I use it more and actually need a battery that will retain charge. Alot of Auto dealerships have Toughbooks similar to mine, I think CF-30 or something like that is what they have with the flip screen. Nissan installed Consult on them and Ford went to them as well after they worked out the breakout box was useless. The actual tough Toughbooks are a little low on spec nowadays. Mine is 1.5 GhZ and it come with 512 MB of RAM and an old ATA drive. I fitted a SATA SSD and an extra 512 MB RAM and it runs Win 10 reasonably well.

[antus]

Pretty much from the marketing only. I just googled the subject and a few articles that agree but none really clarify how to pick the business ones. http://www.laptopmag.com/articles/10-re ... -notebooks

Obviously any company can sell anything, but its not a bad rule of thumb start with.

[immortality]

I must have had a good run with my previous Acer laptop. It lasted many years and only started failing when I was using it to do video file conversions where it basically ran at 100% load overnight for many nights.....

[vlad01]

I also would recommend a tough book, a good 2nd units from about 5 years ago with i5 and i7 are to be had for about 500-800 bucks and are of the better quality. New ones of lesser quality are min of 4.5k, shit expensive.

I have an old Toshiba 2004 model with intel centrino. 4gig of ram and running win7. Works fine apart from it always loosing screws in the past until I loctited them all in and as of last time I used it a USB port has worn out and starting to loose connection mid logging when the cable moves. Old Toshibas are good, but for the life of you, don't touch the new ones. They are horrific, design wise and quality.

I have a semi new one from work. Slooooow as all shit. Like trying to run vista on a 486 slow. its got quad core i7, geforce 700 series, 8gigs of ram but just runs badly for an unknown reason. Has a really badly designed touch pad where just moving from point a to b would go nuts and open everything along the way. I had to disable all gesture and tap clicking to even make it usable. I can't see the screen unless I view it at night or dark area as the screen is a mirror polished finish and the reflections is far brighter than the image. Dumb ass touch screen as well, completely useless and you can't clean the screen unless its off as it opens everything if you wipe it.

keys failing left right and center, 3/4 of the numpad did not work from new. And recently lost operation of some of the keys, only the ones I don't use much ironically, but important ones like ctrl or alt. It also runs real hot and has a horrific coil whine. So when the laptop is processing its making the same sorts of NCIS "computer searching" sound effect they use in the show.