Doing my taxes and my laptop let out the magic smoke.

[dbhost]

So while I was finishing up my taxes, yes I had to wait until late to do them. My former employer issued a corrected W2... Anyway as I was working away on my deductions, it simply blipped out of existence, and that oh so recognizeable smell of frying electric components wafted into the air.

Thank GOD for filing extensions.
Unfortunatley my laptop was past warranty, at 2.5 years old warranty is only 1 year gee thanks, and it was NOT a low end laptop at $1,500.00... REALLY ticked off about that.

Had to grab something to get back working, got a deal on a mid tier Lenovo V15 business laptop (Ryzen 7 4.5Ghz 8 core, 1TB NVME storage, 40GB RAM etc...) just a smaller screen... And at a third of what I paid for the dead one...

I have spent the past weekend reloading, reconfiguring the new laptop AND working on my taxes. Even though I have an extension I want this in sooner rather than later.

[leehljp]

["and it was NOT a low end laptop at $1,500.00... REALLY ticked off about that."]

Sorry about your loss. It is pain!

I usually purchase a loaded laptop - at least double the standard storage, at least twice the RAM, the latest processor (but not always the fastest version), and ever since I could afford it - SSD. In all my years of buying laptops over 30 years, at a rate of about 1 new one every 3 years, I have only had 1 to die on me - 2 years in and that was 5 years ago just as covid was getting started. All my old ones went to LOML or daughters as I upgraded to a new one. My current one is 5 and still in warranty - I pay about $100 each year to keep it going.

I bought a new laptop in 2012 for LOML and she still uses it! Not a single problem except that she always stays about 3 years behind on updates.

[Jim Frye]

In my 4+ decades in IT, I've never had a computer do a smoke test. I once had a laptop battery go up in flames and I know of several folks that have had their laptops do it. When it came time to replace our ten year old ASUS tower, I fought SWMBO $ DIL against a laptop and bought an HP Envy tower instead. Three weeks afterwards, the DIL's company laptop went south. Fortunately, her IT department understands backup importance (thousands of employees) and replaced it the next day.

[dbhost]

For what it's worth, I have worked in IT since 1999, and owned computers since 1984, Started off with an Atari 1200XL. I typically buy as high end as my budget will allow within reason as I will not buy any Apple gear, in all those years I have seen including this laptop a grand total of 3 devices. In about 2004 I was unboxing / loading a Dell engineering workstation that let the magic smoke out on first power up, in 2018 a Hewlett Packard server toasted a RAID controller on reboot, and now this laptop.

The typical hardware failures I have encountered have been "soft" failures where they simply stop working less dramatically, or moving parts failures. HDDs have bearings give out, fans fail etc...

FWIW, I DID send the Asus back to Asus, they are inspecting it and may repair it as a "customer goodwill" gesture if it was indeed a MFG failure.

My replacement was chosen a bit further down the spectrum as I am long term unemployed now, needed something to run Windows NOW for potential interviews, and it will double as a video editing workstation in the camper, so I picked one with a MUCH lower power requirement only taking 60w and can be run off a lighter socket in the camper instead of 120w or inverted 110v power... (That Asus ios a power hog but boy is it fast!).

My last Lenovo was bought due to its semi unique convertible interface. The clamshell would fold 180 degrees and the thing had a touch screen. Worked somewhat like a giant tablet... It was great for the time, but now a lower / mid tier CPU, and only 8GB ram left it in the dust... Win 11 wouldn't run on it, and Win 10 left a lot to be desired. It runs Ubuntu fine and I do use it occasionally for testing.

[LCHIEN]

FWIW, I have always built my desktops from 1977 (Several S-100 CP/M computers) and lots of PCs,

Right now I have a pretty potent core I9-12900K machine I built, but you know, I have also got two Bee-Link S-12 mini PCs with N-100 Intel processors that are as good as and better in many ways than the desktops I built in 2012. And I only paid $159 or so from Amazon, they are good stopgap machines and they only draw about 15 watts and surprisingly capable. Using dual monitors and my old wireless keyboard/mouse. Comes with Win 11 Pro loaded.

[twistsol]

Back in my college days when I repaired computers for a living (among other things) we used to joke in the shop that Apple put urgency sensors in the systems so they'd be sure to fail when you needed them most.

I've only had two failures lifetime that left me in a non workable situation.

• I replaced my Macbook Pro over a weekend and only took the new one with me on a road trip. The drive failed two days in on a four day old computer.
• The other time, TSA stopped me for additional screening and the guy running the conveyor kept pushing bags through until the bin with my laptop got pushed off the end of the conveyor and landed on the corner shattering the screen and cracking the motherboard. After the incident above I now carry an external SSD with me that has a backup I can restore in under an hour, but I had to swing by the Denver Apple store to get a new laptop before I went into work Monday morning. TSA eventually reimbursed me but it took nearly a year.

[leehljp]

My one computer death was a 2017 MacBook. I keep HD backups and still have some HDs from early 2000's with backed up clones. On my calendar app, I have some dates filled in back into 1997 when I started using a personal digital assistant that would sync with my computers (Macs). I got into Macs in 1989 when I was in Japan. Two days before we were to leave on furlough, I went downtown Tokyo to Shibuya and went into a section of two stores that had international magazines. I picked up half a dozen computer mags to read on the way home. I was looking for a computer system that ran Japanese but with English instructions. The problem with Japanese computers is that in order to understand Japanese Computerese instructions, one had to KNOW it in advance. Japanese said that to me and Japanese speaking Americans said that. There was no easing into it. Period. ON the flight home, I saw an ad in the one Mac mag that said: " Japanese OS with English Instructions" and the address was San Francisco. That pushed me into Macs. Besides I loved graphics and my kids wanted to do graphics. Back Home - here in the USA, I bought a Mac and the Japanese OS with English instructions. After 6 months, we were back in Tokyo. I went to a Mac club and took my Mac with its Japanese OS. There was a Japanese man there with his $5000.00 Toshiba laptop that he was issued and had been with him in is travels to a dozen countries. He decided to try my Japanese Mac OS in Japanese and was amazed. He said I had more Kanji characters on my Mac than his Toshiba did.

Staying with Macs from then on, I did run into some strong anti-Mac sentiment with our organization leadership. But there was one problem - the new windows and 3.1 in Japanese did not always open MS Word or other documents cleanly from our Windows centric organization in the US. It was a problem. The only ones that could open the documents with the formatting in place were the few Mac people. I would get a call almost weekly from my org's Japan administrator to open a specific doc and save it in the Word format on my computer and email my saved doc to him. It then opened perfectly for him and he would send it out to our workers in Japan.. We (All Japan co-workers) had problems with the "requests" app from our company in the US. Our East Asia IT guy send out a request to ALL Japan personnel and asked why that app worked on every computer of every worker (of our Organization) in Every country EXCEPT those of us in Japan. I did some digging on my IBM laptop and found out that they did not write clean code, but just enough to get the job done. I wrote both our company in the US and IT guy in East Asia and sent screen shots. As long as the computer was set for English ONLY, the app worked, but when it was set to the Japanese mode, the problem arose. On my Macs, the app worked OK but did have a few odd characters, but it worked. ON the IBM/windows, in Japanese it did not. My conclusion was that their code was not complete and worked well on single byte code, but not in double byte code - which was a the terminology before "unicode". A few months later, they had their app re-written and it worked on our Windows Japanese computers. When the computers were in English mode only, it could not do Japanese, but when in Japanese mode it could do both Japanese and English, therefore, our co-workers kept their computers in the Japanese OS mode 100% of the time.

One other interesting thing that happened to me was that Japanese always commented about how fast I could type Japanese. Japanese were always cordial and complementing and to me it was over the top - too much. One day, a fellow commented to me about how fast I typed the Japanese and I got a little aggravated. I said, "Thank you but I don't type that fast!. maybe 10 to 15 Japanese words a minute.>" He responded to me: "Hank-san, In America, you learned how to type on a standard keyboard and your school had a class room with typewriters in it. You know how to use the keyboard without looking. Here in Japan (in the early 1990s) we have NO standardized keyboard. We did not have typing in school. Sony, Toshiba, Sanyo, (and a few more) companies' computers all have different keyboard layouts. Yes, if we knew the American QUERTY keyboard, we could use that but we have not had it to type. So you DO type faster Japanese writing than 99% of the Japanese."

[dbhost]

So I ended up with the Lenovo V15 business laptop (Ryzen 7, 40Gb, 1TB NVME) and a GMKTek Nucbox K11 (Ryzen 9, 32GB, 2TB NVME). That way I have a "spare" if / when one of them lets the smoke out.