Craptops: Crappy Laptops

[georgespamme]

 

Craptops: Crappy Laptops

Okay, maybe you don't own a pizza box PC, but every techie can make good use of a craptop -- a cheap little machine that's portable and somewhat disposable.  Much like Little Caesars pizza, a craptop may not provide a great user experience, but hey, pizza is pizza, right?  And as we all know, pepperoni is just a number.  Whether it's web browsing while traveling, diagnosing pc issues, or carrying out semi-shady business on the web, craptops can be useful, especially in their ability to take abuse we wouldn't dare put on a more expensive piece of hardware.

 

Do you own a craptop?  If so, what do you use it for, and how did you acquire it?

[Speedyv]

Have a Toshiba with a Celeron...

 

It's painstakingly slow. I try to avoid it like the plague.

[Syntaxvgm]

I own an m18x. It's 18 pounds with charger. I got it used a long time ago. I think it's a good laptop, but my nuts disagree.

It's a cracktop. As in nut-cracking laptop.

[Akolyte]

I used to have some single core AMD Compaq laptop.  Clunky as balls but lasted for 7 years, recently it died.  But it had a good life.  Now I have an HP stream which maybe doesn't classify as a craptop but its something. 

[dadasmithywinkle]

 

Craptops: Crappy Laptops

Okay, maybe you don't own a pizza box PC, but every techie can make good use of a craptop -- a cheap little machine that's portable and somewhat disposable.  Much like Little Caesars pizza, a craptop may not provide a great user experience, but hey, pizza is pizza, right?  And as we all know, pepperoni is just a number.  Whether it's web browsing while traveling, diagnosing pc issues, or carrying out semi-shady business on the web, craptops can be useful, especially in their ability to take abuse we wouldn't dare put on a more expensive piece of hardware.

 

Do you own a craptop?  If so, what do you use it for, and how did you acquire it?

I WANT A LAPTOP LIKE THAT

 

I have Craptowers but the only laptop I have my MacBook.

[Dabombinable]

I own an m18x. It's 18 pounds with charger. I got it used a long time ago. I think it's a good laptop, but my nuts disagree.

It's a cracktop. As in nut-cracking laptop.

Ever used a Presario R3000? They are supposedly notebooks but they are more like 4kg desktop replacements that fry and crush your nuts.

[elecxonica]

I have a stream 11, but I use it far too much to coonsider it a "craptop".

[awesomes8wc3]

Acer Icona W5. $800 Paperweight.

Can't even do microsoft word without falling flat on its face. Not even useful as a throw around laptop.

 

Similar Passmark to a 2005 AMD Turion 64 ML-44...but even the Turion can do more than this "laptop", like 64 bit and virtualization for example. Fucking pathetic.

[Syntaxvgm]

Ever used a Presario R3000? They are supposedly notebooks but they are more like 4kg desktop replacements that fry and crush your nuts.

No I didn't but I had a dell laptop with a desktop Pentium 4. Same situation. Still have it actually.

[QueenDemetria]

I probably have the best "Craptop" on LTT. Prepare your eyes, here is my Dell Latitude D620:

When I got this machine there were many parts broken on it and it just wasn't worth fixing. I wanted to make a portable server for school and thought "This will be perfect", boy was I wrong. It now rests in my cabinet of shame, but I do have a couple plans for this "thing". Oddly enough its still fully functional and I have two batteries for it(regular battery and CD bay battery, neither are good), so I might turn it into a pizza box computer or something.

[Castdeath97]

I'm not gonna talk about my toshiba L45 anymore than this: intel graphics, but still only manages to get 2 hour of goddam battery life on bloody power saver when I got it thanks to the carpware and shovel ware.

[Dabombinable]

No I didn't but I had a dell laptop with a desktop Pentium 4. Same situation. Still have it actually.

Gotta love the laptops with the desktop CPU's (my particular R3000 had one, and could use any CPU with the same or lower power consumption, socket permitting), all they needed was better GPU's and they'd have kicked ass.

[Jerakl]

I bought a G550jk, regret my decision, wish I would have bought something thinner lighter and more portable. But only sometimes.

[Peter Vaughan Truslow]

 

Craptops: Crappy Laptops

Okay, maybe you don't own a pizza box PC, but every techie can make good use of a craptop -- a cheap little machine that's portable and somewhat disposable.  Much like Little Caesars pizza, a craptop may not provide a great user experience, but hey, pizza is pizza, right?  And as we all know, pepperoni is just a number.  Whether it's web browsing while traveling, diagnosing pc issues, or carrying out semi-shady business on the web, craptops can be useful, especially in their ability to take abuse we wouldn't dare put on a more expensive piece of hardware.

 

Do you own a craptop?  If so, what do you use it for, and how did you acquire it?

I used to own a craptop. it was actually the only laptop I had. I bought it off a buddy, who bought it off a friend who had a cat and said it would turn on, but after a while the fan would spin-up and the laptop would shut off.

I got it for $40 and immediately cleaned the heatsink of the ball of hair and replaced the thermal compound. the laptop barely needed the fan at idle.

it was a core2 duo machine with 4gb DDR2 and I put a 120gb SSD in the thing.

it served me well for a while until I killed it in the end while taking it apart. not exactly sure how it happened.

[KemoKa]

Back home, I have a Sharp PC-GP10-CH

yes.

Yes, one of these.

 

Yes.

 

To be honest, since I got Norton off of it, it runs like a dream. Even if there's an HDD failure, all I have to do is leave it for a couple of days and it fixes itself.

First mobile Athlon. 1200MHz.

[georgespamme]

Cool replies.  I'm looking for a new craptop.  Trying to find one as cheap as I can.  A local university has a classified ad system, and I think I may try to salvage a laptop there from some not-so-technical college student.

[Thorium19]

Have a Toshiba with a Celeron...

 

It's painstakingly slow. I try to avoid it like the plague.

 

Bet toshitba can top it (my name for my laptop) AMD V140 single core CPU with ATI HD4200 graphics (apparently). It's so damn slow, but it's the only windows computer in my house until branwen is completed.

[AlexStriz]

I probably have the best "Craptop" on LTT. Prepare your eyes, here is my Dell Latitude D620:

~~~

When I got this machine there were many parts broken on it and it just wasn't worth fixing. I wanted to make a portable server for school and thought "This will be perfect", boy was I wrong. It now rests in my cabinet of shame, but I do have a couple plans for this "thing". Oddly enough its still fully functional and I have two batteries for it(regular battery and CD bay battery, neither are good), so I might turn it into a pizza box computer or something.

I want to know what else is in your cabinet of shame

 

 

 

When my MacBook broke (was icing my leg overnight.. laptop was on a nightstand.. water leaked onto and into it overnight. Woke up.. didnt boot. A day later Linus uploaded his wet laptop recovery video. I cried), my friend gave me this crappy like 7 year old laptop to use. I had never heard of that company until then (Hanspree). 

 

Intel Atom N450, 1gb of RAM, 160gb hard drive. The thing struggled with Linux Mint. The screen was held to the rest of the laptop by duct tape, and the internal SATA connector was broken, so the 160gb boot drive was connected to an outer USB port and then taped onto the laptop. The fans were constantly on. Sounded like an animal that was slowly dying inside a jet turbine. 

 

Then it died. It was a happy day. We played baseball with it

[windude99]

I have an Acer Aspire One D270. That thing is literally the worst netbook (or any laptop, for that matter) I have ever bought. I got it used and it has DPC latency through the roof under Windows. Xubuntu works OK and latency has seemed to quit under that but as soon as you go back to Windows, latency is back. It got damaged and I went back to my AOD255 and that thing is so much better. Much less latency and the gpu runs aero better even though it is supposed to be less powerful. The D270 is awful. Maybe mine was defective. Blah!

[QueenDemetria]

I want to know what else is in your cabinet of shame

Couple of motherboards, few HDD's, bunch of stock AMD coolers, and random cables.

[ApolloX75]

I still have my Toshiba A70. Pentium 4 desktop chip with Hyperthreading in a laptop. What a great idea. Hits 70C on idle; can't handle anything more than Windows XP; had to strip all the panels off the bottom to keep it from randomly overheating and has about 20 minutes of battery life.

 

Oooh and a Radeon 7000 IGP! THE POWER!

[Jackgamer91]

My craptop is an ASUS 1215n with an Atom D525 processor that goes up to 100% simply.loading YouTube and 4 gigs of RAM. It is a POS and I gave away my nexus 7 tablet for it.

I have several crap towers but they are HTPC so no need to be powerful.

[Aniallation]

Up until my current HP Elitebook I pretty much only had Pentium M laptops, but they were actually great performers for the tasks that I need to do on a laptop.

 

My first laptop was one of these, I don't remember the model number, but it looked exactly the same. Pentium M 1.7GHz, 1GB RAM. The speakers were SOOOOO loud like wtf

 

 

 

After that broke I got one of these, Toshiba Satellite A100 with a Celeron M

, 2GB of RAM and a 120GB Intel 530 SSD (seriously).

 

[georgespamme]

I still have my Toshiba A70. Pentium 4 desktop chip with Hyperthreading in a laptop. What a great idea. Hits 70C on idle; can't handle anything more than Windows XP; had to strip all the panels off the bottom to keep it from randomly overheating and has about 20 minutes of battery life.

 

Oooh and a Radeon 7000 IGP! THE POWER!

Hahaha... but just think, for 20 minutes you can probably like play CRYSIS on ULTRA low settings IN THE MIDDLE OF A FOREST!!  (You'll probably start a forest fire though)

 

 

. . . The netbook is running Arch Linux off a 4GB USB 2.0 drive with 160 packages and CLI only to reduce breakage and I don't need a GUI plus the screen, keyboard, touchpad and battery are all atrocious. The other 2 USB 2.0 ports are being used for the same flash drives with a 4GB SDcard to create a 3 drive 12GB Btrfs RAID 0 array . . .

Wow, dat RAID array... intense... have you ever measured the speed?

 

After that broke I got one of these, Toshiba Satellite A100 with a Pentium M

, 2GB of RAM and a 120GB Intel 530 SSD (seriously).

Woah, talk about cutting edge!  Haha, I have that same SSD in the system I'm typing on now

[windude99]

Up until my current HP Elitebook I pretty much only had Pentium M laptops, but they were actually great performers for the tasks that I need to do on a laptop.

 

My first laptop was one of these, I don't remember the model number, but it looked exactly the same. Pentium M 1.7GHz, 1GB RAM. The speakers were SOOOOO loud like wtf

 

 

 

After that broke I got one of these, Toshiba Satellite A100 with a Celeron M 420, 2GB of RAM and a 120GB Intel 530 SSD (seriously).

 

That top laptop might be an Inspiron 8600. I have one of those. Mine has a Geforce FX Go5200 in it. Those laptops are pretty cool.