The case

The case
near the trackpad cracked. This was due actually to a flawed repair job by a technician that replaced my LCD. The technician didn’t mate one of the friction-lock connectors on the keyboard bezel exactly, which created a stress point and eventually caused the panel to crack.

Speaking of which, the LCD had to be replaced once. The LCD failed by having a set of horizontal lines across the bottom of the panel (I recognized that failure as stress-related failure of the COB drivers on the panel). The replacement LCD had a flaw in it too — there was a spot of blue pixels, about ten pixels on a side, that were always stuck-on, just faintly. It wasn’t annoying enough for another return but still, it’s unfortunate that the replacement Acer BTP-ARJ1 Battery LCD had a significant flaw as well.

One of the DRAM SO-DIMMs failed about 1.5 years into the laptop’s life. It was manifested by lots of bluescreens, and then I ran some DRAM test software and identified the problem. Spray-cooling the DRAM chips fixed the problem, so I installed some extra heat sinking in the Acer BTP-AQJ1 Battery, which got around the problem for another month. Eventually, I had to call in for a replacement of the chips, which was laudably painless. The IBM service rep just sent out the replacement chips right away, no questions asked, and everything worked fine from then on (the laptop was still under its extended warranty at this time). However, it does highlight the fact that there is a thermal design flaw in the DRAM area: there is no heat piping or heat sinking around it. I think that’s because most configurations use less DRAM; I really cranked up the DRAM configuration, which meant I installed the most extreme, power-hungry devices in my laptop, pushing the thermal design margin right to the edge.

The trackpoint mouse was flakey Acer Laptop Battery sometimes; the drivers would sometimes not load properly or crash, which is annoying.

The ThinkVantage system update software, while a nice concept, is a bit annoying to use as it has to update itself typically before updating the system. As a general note, I don’t like vendor-specific extensions to the OS. They are never very well done, and often break: “Dear vendor, please stop trying to ‘add value’. You actually are destroying the value of your brand. Just make your good hardware and don’t get in my way, kthx bai.”

The FireGL Acer BTP-APJ1 Battery graphics chipset, while very powerful, had some serious compatibility limitations. The OpenGL drivers never really worked right, and it was totally unsupported by some games, such as Second Life. Unfortunately, graphics drivers for laptops lag the main branch, since it seems every laptop requires a bit of tweaking to the drivers by the vendor.

The UltraBay lithium polymer battery that I purchased failed — twice. The failure was manifested in the Acer Aspire 1300 Battery going to 60% capacity within two months of use. The first time I called it into warranty service and got a replacement, and the second time it failed I just decided it was a design flaw and gave up on replacing it. The UltraBay lithium polymer is handy for situations where you’re on battery power and you want to swap out the main battery without going into hibernation. Fortunately, that situation was rare and the battery life of the main batteries was good enough, so it wasn’t really a problem in practice.

This is more my fault than anything else, but 100 GB was too small to live in. It didn’t help that I had multiple VMware images on my machine and my hardware design tools often chew up over 3GB per tool. The 2 GB of DRAM was also tough to live in Acer LCBTP03003 Battery; Altium DXP eats a gigabyte on its own, so starting and stopping the tool is painful as the page file starts kicking in.

Minor nit: the TrackPoint mouse will become uncalibrated if you lean on it lightly for too long, and the mouse will start gliding across the screen on its own. Fortunately, the driver is very intelligent and detects this condition so it’s short-lived.

This is a general fault of windows, but the 65k GDI resource limitation just sucks. Running out of GDI resources was the key source of reboots for me; Adobe tools and Altium DXP were notorious for leaking GDI objects, and unfortunately I use both heavily.

Bluescreens were rare, typically caused by either pulling out USB devices at inopportune times or problems occurring during standby, but one weirdness really got to me. Toward the end, if I walked around with the laptop, it would blue screen. This was because the hard drive shock detector would pause the drive, which would cause some application fault in windows that wasn’t expecting the pause. If I had to move around, I had to suspend the shock protection, which is sort of defeating the purpose of the protection. This wasn’t the case when I first started using my Acer TravelMate 4500 Battery. Why it developed this problem over time is a mystery to me.

Well, that’s my experience with the IBM T60p. I think my experience can be summarized by the fact that my new laptop is an Acer Aspire 1410 Battery — they won a repeat customer. The T61p is still settling in. I like the extra performance it brings, but it has some quirks of its own that I’m still learning to get used to. It’s funny, but every time I get a new laptop, I have to learn all of its little bugs and find ways to patch my behavior to avoid aggravating them. For example, I’ve trained myself to unplug my webcam before hitting the eject button on the minidock, because failing to do so causes a blue screen without Acer Aspire 1680 Battery. So far, none of the quirks have been so bad that I’ve given up on the machine. In addition to the webcam issue, I did have a spate of blue screens to deal with when I first got the laptop (mostly around minidock ejection and going into and out of standby), and I had to do some digging around in the Minidump logs to figure out exactly what behavior was triggering them. I wonder what other users do when this sort of thing happens to them? post by Acer Laptop Battery.