How Much Damage Can the 1420 Take?

This morning, I put my Inspiron 1420 in my messenger bag, and set it side facing up in the back of my brother's car trunk. There was a bunch of other junk back there.
After the car ride, when I opened the trunk, everything had gotten moved around, and my laptop was in an awkward position.

I never really had time to check for any damages, but I'm just curious to know how much damage a 1420 can take before, say, the paint gets scratched off, the HDD fails, the keyboard keys wear-out, etc.

Any insight into this information would be appreciated.

 

the paint is more like a rubber coating is it not? I think that seeming as you are treating your notebook like a peice of crap, that you should find out for all of us, Just how much damage it can take.. Just start up a good game of CSS and start beating the **** out of your laptop and see when your FPS starts to dwindle.

 

I imagine that hard treatment like that will shorten the life of components, even if it doesn't cause them to fail immediately.

 

I think it will take a decent beating. The paint will obviously come off first, but the HDs are made to take a much bigger pounding. You've got to give it a good shock (throw) to give it good damage.

 

Don't take it the wrong way; I'm crazy careful about the condition of my laptop. But there was no room in the front and I was doing homework on my lap!

 

what exactly can fail in a harddrive... ive taken many apart and the heads seem very secure and so do the plates... so what is it that makes them so shock prone...

 

well you don't want the disks to move at all, any movement will cause it to fail. That's why they advetise those special harddrives that lock down your disks when they sense any change in the balance.

 

Please don't tell me you were driving and doing your homework at the same time.......lol...

Joking, obviously your brother was driving...right?

 

Ya, my bro was driving.

 

Well hard drives can fail very easily, there precision mechanical devices. The head literally, floats just nm (nano meters) above the disk, and if theres contact, you have a head crash. A particle of dust is like, a bolder to a hard drive, if that clears up how sensitive these little devices truly are. After time, of constant use, of heating up, then cooling down and so on, the rid-bits that hold the plates in give away and the plates are knocked off balance. Also the bolt that holds on the arm starts to get loose after time on them. That's just a few scenarios of common hard drive problems, off the top of my head.

But,

Like ivealwaysgotmail said, the way that the OP is treating his notebook, he'll figure out how much it can take the way he's handling it.

The machine should last a long time if taken care of. They build them to be dropped, so they can take a thumping and still work. But, don't expect it to look as pretty.. Beauty is not ever..