Laptop paint finish is not what it used to be
And manufacturers couldn't care less
By Chip Mulligan: Tuesday 22 August 2006, 09:28
IN A PREVIOUS JOB, the IT department were generous enough to give
me, when I asked for a laptop on which to do engineering work, a
stone-aged Dell based on a Pentium 200, upgraded to 256MB of
RAM.
It was bruised and battered from having gone all over the world and
had even survived being hit during a game of office football,
however worked surprisingly well. Having installed Win2K and
disabled all unnecessary services, it proved pretty snappy
ironically seeming at times quicker than a desktop P4 I was using
at the time.
But I digress; the astonishing thing about this laptop was that,
abused as it was, the paint remained the colour it was intended to
be, and the casing still held the electronics together in a fairly
solid fashion.
Likewise my current colleagues have ancient and decrepit IBM
ThinkPads (from the days when IBM was IBM), and they too have stood
up well to the test of time.
However, when I posted a picture of my TravelMate 4600 (Acers
business series) in another article, several people wrote in to
point out that the paint on my trackpad had faded, revealing the
bare white plastic, and that their Acers had suffered the same
fate.
On closer investigation, I discovered that this wasnt the only
sign of premature aging many of the commonly used keys had lost
their matt effect finish, and were now as shiny as the head of the
bald man sat next to me on this train as I type this.
I got in touch with my father, who also owns a TravelMate, and his
has gone the same way. So this seems to have the signs of something
above and beyond than general ham-fistedness.
In this photo, not the clearest (I apologise), you can particularly
see how right hand side of the space bar has become glossy, as have
letters such as I and C
Furthermore, all the corners of the laptop have suffered with the
silver paint rubbing, not scratching, away to reveal bare plastic,
and on the rear panel, two screws have broken through their plastic
leaving the hinge cover flapping in the wind.
Now clearly some of the blame for this has to go down to our desire
to have fashionable laptop styling, while expecting the cost to
continue dropping, but is it really acceptable to expect people to
put up with expensive product that, after just three months of
normal use, look tattier than a tramps special brew-stained
coat?
But its not just Acer a friends two-month old Dell also suffers
from this, and were sure that many other brands manufactured in
the large ODMs will likely be going the same way.
So its over to you: our intrepid readers. Do you have a laptop
that is aging as quickly as a Big Brother "celebrity"? If so, send
us some pictures and your story to [email protected] and
Ill get on the case. ì
