What maintenance is required/recommended?

2 major threads recently on cleaning dust from fans (one was titled about Laptop Cooling). Tons of posts also advising on regular, complete discharge of battery.

Judging by your avatar, probably need to check out the thread on cleaning the screen, though I don't think they covered sputtum. Ditto the keyboard and general case. Might want to cover the whole with a sheet of plastic.

Actually, there's not much to do physically. Keep it clean. I use the 3M cleaning cloths with the microweave whatever. You can get them nearly anywhere in 3 packs. They last forever and you can wash them. As long as they haven't picked up something gritty, they won't scratch you screen or case. And they do a fabulous job of cleaning.

There are also the fans and cooling channels. Unfortunately, you can't really get to the fans on the new machines without getting really serious about disassembly, bad design IYAM, but you can clean out the channels on the heat sink and blow/suck on the rest. There are threads on all that. Do a search.

You can condition the battery, check your manual. There's some controversy as to the efficacy of this or if its even doing anything, but my personal experience is that a regular full discharge/charge helps keep my batteries up. Just run the machine down after turning off all programs and disabling the sleep/hibernate functions. Again, this has been discussed in here loads.

Otherwise, its all software. Check for driver updates and upgrades. The forums here are a good place for keeping up on what's available. Some folks recommend a full OS reinstall on a regular basis, say every 6 months or so. I only do it when things seem to be slowing down or stuff isn't working. As the old saying goes, don't break it if it ain't fixed. Beyond that, you can install Henrik's temperature monitor, and there are other programs that can help you monitor what's happening or let you play with the gear. Seems as though some folks have found some OC programs for the 5680 and are playing with that. Hopefully they won't have a China Syndrome.

You can also download the service manual for you machine from the CLEVO site. There are threads on that as well.

Finally, there is a heck of a lot of information in these forums, its probably the largest source for SAGERs there is as well as for other laptops and other stuff too. Pick a subject, do a search! A great pasttime for a rainy day.

My theory is the one Sager and PC Torque like the best:
Just buy a new machine every year or so!

-myrkat

for running the battery down completely I usually wait until like 3% or so then reboot and go into BIOs and let it die completely there so I won't kill the PC straight out of windows.

I like that one too, can I have your old one this year. Yeah, its just an 8887 with the incredible screen but its better than my 8886. I'll pay the shipping. Heck, I'll come and pick it up in person. I'll even give you a receipt for a donation to A Worthy Cause.

I have an ID in that name for just such purposes. Actually, its Ahnohld Worthy Cause, but I initialize Ahnohld. I don't want to Cause Confuscian.

where do I get Henrik's temperature monitor ive looked around but cant find any sites.

Here you go. Thats a list of all Henrik's programs.

thanks, but I couldnt get the windows one to work oh well I guess.

I have a 2-year-old brother and Im one of those people who are paranoid about their stuff. Know one of those door chains you put on your front door? I have one of those right at the top on my room door.

*cough* Reformat *cough*

With Windows XP? Nah, not really, its not needed. Now 98, HAH, yeah. The majority of things in XP can be tweaked enough to fix the old age delay issues resulting from installing too much crap lol, and besides that, most systems burn in after a while from all the tweaking. IOW, I find ym system performs better now than it did with a fresh install of XP. Go figure!

With XP, some things definitely get better with time (eg precaching - it analyses what apps you use most often and precaches them for faster acces; it also "learns" about your hardware etc and optimizes the boot process over the first, say, 10 boots), but it is still Windows, and thus eventually screws up.

XP not idiot proof

Wow, good for you!

I am able to really mess things up within half a year or so. My registry explodes and performance keeps dropping. To reinstall is the best tweak I know!

Yeah XP is better than 98 but I spend certin amounts of free time in the regestry playing around(probably shouldn't but It's amazing just how much one can customize windows) Thats why I keep an updated DVD-RW ghost image of my perfect configuration and instalation. If I break something My computer is back to the way it was in just 13 min. I about died when I saw norton ghost actualy burning to a DVD inside DOS.

XP compared to 98 is heaven and hell. When I got rid of 98 and put on XP on my family T-Bird 900, it was absolute heaven (in comparison).

Yeah, its bloody amazing. Once I got Ghost, I could never stop using it. Even though my image sits on a separate partition (so its still vulnurable to the death of the drive), it is still bloody awesome. Something wrong? Yonk! Back up and running in 10 minutes (drive to drive is even faster than DVD/CD to drive).