Reminds me of the push a while back to rebrand laptops as "notebooks" - because many laptops (esp Dell XPS) are not built with a strong enough backbone to keep their own weight from sagging in the middle, and because they get hot enough to cause damage to legs.
I have had an XPS since 2017, it had everything I wanted (I thought) - but I seriously regretted the decision almost immediately. High-intensity tasks (gaming, TDD, etc) would cause it to conk out from overheating because they hadn't configured the bios correctly - spent hours with various levels of Dell support trying to get it fixed, with them installing various combinations of different versions of the bios firmware. The GPU setup wasn't quite as straightforward as it could have been (which isn't really Dell's problem I guess - if I was running windows, it might not have been a problem at all)
Nowadays, the base of the laptop has bowed, causing the trackpad to unglue and jut out at an angle. I have a massive mark on my screen where I once tried to shut my laptop normally - I still have to take it places, and to do that I sandwich a piece of polystyrene in it to protect the screen. I hope this is warped due to heat and not the battery bowing, but I'm burying my head in the sand on that one. And yes, I have to shut it down every time I transport it.
Thankfully, once I have the funds available, I know what laptop I'm getting next. And it won't be a dell.
I had the exact same issue (base of the laptop bowing because the battery is swollen, the trackpad was almost coming out) : it's actually pretty straightforward to replace the battery yourself.
Unscrew something like 8 standard screw, replace the battery, rescrew.
> the push a while back to rebrand laptops as "notebooks" - because many laptops (esp Dell XPS) are not built with a strong enough backbone to keep their own weight from sagging in the middle, and because they get hot enough to cause damage to legs.
This wasn't a rebranding, it was a category of laptop. Cheap, small, and light, designed for people who intended to offload many local functions to the cloud. -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netbook
Faded away as a term once this became the default thing to do.
Afraid Netbook and Notebook are two very different categories.
Had a couple of netbooks in my time, they were pretty good for what they were.
But no, I'm talking about full-blown 15-17 inch laptops that were so poorly built that if you tried to rest them on your lap, the trackpad would stop working, or keys on the keyboard would randomly press, and repeated lap-use would make it worse over time.
Older Siemens-Fujitsu ones did, too. Consumer grade ones, so. The main reason I went to the "professional" ones over a decade ago. Hell, who doesn't carry around his open laptop on one corner from time to time?
If was certainly the norm for laptops in the €500-700 range from the late 00s to at least a few years ago. Happened to the Acer laptop I used in my college days
I have had an XPS since 2017, it had everything I wanted (I thought) - but I seriously regretted the decision almost immediately. High-intensity tasks (gaming, TDD, etc) would cause it to conk out from overheating because they hadn't configured the bios correctly - spent hours with various levels of Dell support trying to get it fixed, with them installing various combinations of different versions of the bios firmware. The GPU setup wasn't quite as straightforward as it could have been (which isn't really Dell's problem I guess - if I was running windows, it might not have been a problem at all)
Nowadays, the base of the laptop has bowed, causing the trackpad to unglue and jut out at an angle. I have a massive mark on my screen where I once tried to shut my laptop normally - I still have to take it places, and to do that I sandwich a piece of polystyrene in it to protect the screen. I hope this is warped due to heat and not the battery bowing, but I'm burying my head in the sand on that one. And yes, I have to shut it down every time I transport it.
Thankfully, once I have the funds available, I know what laptop I'm getting next. And it won't be a dell.