laptops for idiots

hey guys might sound like a stupid question but umm, is keeping your laptop alseep insode a backpack like the booq bag where is is like practically air tight bad for hte laptop. Just wondering becuase I do it with my school laptop but I don't care about that one but I do care about the 9100. Is it better to have it alseep, off, or does it really even matter? just wonderin thanks

Dell Inspiron 9100
P4 3.0, 15.4 UXGA Wide Screen, 512 DDR SDRAM 400MHz, 128MB ATI Mobility Radeon 9700, 60 GB Ultra ATA HD, 24x CD-RW/DVD, TrueMobile1400 WLAN!

 

Hey v-balla6,

Ok, here it is. With my old Toshiba, I used to suspend the system and put it in my backpack, take it with me everywhere etc. This is OK, except that occasionally because of 'noise' (electromagnetic interference, parameter fluctuations, thermal fluctuations, radiation etc), the operating system stored in the RAM will become corrupted despite the active error-correction routines. If this happens, then any work that you DID NOT save on the hard disk and kept in the RAM will be lost. Also, on starting up again you'll have to run the auto diskcheck etc.

With the old style RAM (150nm technology) that was on my Toshiba, the RAM crash happened once in a blue moon (maybe once every 20 times). Also, if you keep suspending your laptop without rebooting after a long time (a few days) the operating system that is loaded and being used in memory becomes unstable, and if you're not careful you could lose your work through an OS crash. But again, this happens only if you've being using the loaded up OS for days and days...

Now, with the 9100 you should really never need to suspend the system, accept for very short periods when you want to save battery life and you want to go off and do something else for a few minutes. The start up and shut down of Windows XP is so fast (especially on the 8600 and 9100) that you frankly never need to suspend. Also, if you just press the power button to shut down on your 9100, all the programs and files that were open at the time will be opened up again next time you start up the system.

If you REALLY need to suspend and take your 9100 in your bag to school, the RAM crash thing I told you about has a higher probability of happening than say with my old Toshiba because of the 60nm technology they are using in the very high density RAM these days. That being said, if you decide to take the risk, you should remember that the 9100 is default configured so that if you suspend and you're on batter, the system will resume after 10 mins automatically and put the laptop into hibernate, which is a little different in that then the loaded OS is stored on the hard disk instead of in the RAM. The problem is, if you're jolting your laptop around whilst it resumes, the hard disk head might smash into your HD and then it will crash - permanently. To solve this problem, make sure you edit the power saving settings to prevent the auto-resume-hibernate function, so that it stays permanently in suspend.

Other than the potential problem with the unexpected resume, the laptop cannot get damaged if you put it in suspend and lug it around everywhere. The worst that can happen is corruption of the data stored in the RAM.

Hope that helps!