Get this: Sager service forgot to replace the thermal pad between my CPU (Pent M 1.7Dothan) and the heat sink/pipe, and now my CPU can't handle clock speeds above 600Mhz without some very dramatic BSODs or seg faults or core dumps.
I've replaced the pad with Arctic Silver 5, but still it is struggling. I definitely can't run at 1.7Ghz anymore, so I've used RMClock to back down to 1.5Gz. I've set the fans to run all the time and I've also temporarily removed the metal grid under the CPU fan to improve airflow.
Regardless, I am so close to being in love with my 3790 after a long term relationship of about 2 years, if it weren't but for the niggling bits that may be standard for /any/ laptop these days. I just don't know if 95% is all we can expect these days. I want my laptop to be up 100% of the time (at least from a hardware perspective, I make software mistakes too) but in reality this 3790 has been up in terms of hardware functionality perhaps 93 percent the time I've owned it.
FYI I'm a seasoned IT professional (or so I'm told) of 12 years. Mostly senior sysadmin stuff and project management. But when our ersatz president dropped his Titanium iBook on his boat -- right on the corner of the laptop, onto the teak, at which point it practically exploded into a shower of little and big parts -- he swept all of it into a plastic bag, everybody in IT took a look and just laughed, and I took it home and put it back together with Super Glue and two cabinet door hinges for the LCD.
I sent my 3790 back to Sager for warranty repair in August of 2005: the touchpad button was stuck and the ethernet port was bad. Both were fixed at no charge to me (except for my portion of the UPS shipping). Then I got a phone call from the technician stating that he would replace the LCD (WUXGA 1920z1600) for $150. I asked why the charge and he said that Sager couldn't replace screens that were /scratched/ -- he said there was a big scratch on the surface of the viewing area and he couldn't replace it under warranty because of the scratch so I gave him $150 to replace the screen. I figured what the hell- the screen was just starting to get a little dull and my screen suffered from the classic 3790 pressure dimple - and I didn't remember any scratch, especially as I use only the most expensive lens cloth and cleaner to clean my LCD displays.
6 weeks later my laptop returned to me, and the first thing I noticed was that the silver SAGER badge on the lid was scratched all to hell, as if my laptop had been sitting on it's back for a long time with no protection under, with grit under the badge.
And they charged me $150 for a new screen to replace a screen with a non-existent scratch and with a known quality problem (LCD dimple).
Sager, shame on you.
Regardless, I mustered my enthusiasm and started to use it -- and relatively hard, I admit. The CPU was max'xed out (1.7Ghz Pent M, 1GB RAM, 80GB Toshiba HD, DVD-+RW) for a good 14 hours out of the day as I rendered DivX video, mostly MST3k episodes.
I'm still running the original BIOS, AFAIK, and of course the CPU fan was set to always on by a strangely labelled BIOS setting -- I set the fan back to being thermostatically controlled and marvelled that the fan would shut off at times.
I entered the winter of 2005 with a relatively good feeling -- the laptop was working well, and I had just purchased an IOGEAR 320 external drive.
I used the USB 2.0 interface first, but I began to notice that my computer began to blue screen in XP - maybe once per week. Then I tried the FireWire interface, thinking to offload some of the processing power onto the FireWire hardware. My 3790 would not hold a firewire mount -- the mounted drive would disappear from My Computer at the worst possible times, either playing or ripping movies. I was forced to go back to USB 2.0 to get the mount to stick (320 external formatted as NTFS).
And then it began to go downhill. Instead of once a week, my 3790 began crashing once per day. I reinstalled XP. I ran Gibson's SpinRight. I ran SandraSoft and memtest86. I checked the SMART status on the drive -- it was good but I /thought/ I saw some bad clusters during a chkdsk /r run and so I bought another Toshiba 80GB from TigerDirect and installed XP again, and dual booted into Redhat FC9. Both operating systems, Linux and Windows, crashed once a day with no pattern. With Windows, it would be win32.sys or ntfs.sys or /REALLY BAD/ errors, BSODs I've never even heard of before, like upon login or even before login, strange severe errors, BSODs that didn't even dump memory to file -- I've never seen such BSODs. I've suffered through two this morning.
Linux (Redhat FC9) also dumps core and segfaults on an almost hourly basis, so I am starting to get the feeling that it's /not/ software.
The average failure rate of any given laptop model is like almost ridiculous, right? I mean they expect a very large percentage of units to fail in the field after purchase, and they expect people to either put up with long repair times or handle the problem themselves by either coping or repairing.
I purchased my Sager 3790 in August of 2004 from discountlaptops.com, a company I would entirely endorse from my great experience while also silently wondering about CompAmerica.com...my eyes wouldn't be wandering if my 3790 was behaving well.
I ordered my 3790 about 1 day before the typhoon hit Taiwan, causing my Clevo chassis to be late to Sager and held up my delivery by about 10 weeks: damn typhoon.
I've submitted my woes to Sager and we'll see.
For now, I'm lookign at comp.coamericam with wonderment and I'm thinking about fixing my 3790 and selling it, and purchasing a desktop/slim unit from compamerica.
Unless somebody can tell me that these promising Centrino Duo 2 chipsets are more reliable and run cooler, or if somebody could at least give me a vote of encouragement for nt totally ranting against Sager. They're trying, I'm trying, we're all trying.
I've replaced the pad with Arctic Silver 5, but still it is struggling. I definitely can't run at 1.7Ghz anymore, so I've used RMClock to back down to 1.5Gz. I've set the fans to run all the time and I've also temporarily removed the metal grid under the CPU fan to improve airflow.
Regardless, I am so close to being in love with my 3790 after a long term relationship of about 2 years, if it weren't but for the niggling bits that may be standard for /any/ laptop these days. I just don't know if 95% is all we can expect these days. I want my laptop to be up 100% of the time (at least from a hardware perspective, I make software mistakes too) but in reality this 3790 has been up in terms of hardware functionality perhaps 93 percent the time I've owned it.
FYI I'm a seasoned IT professional (or so I'm told) of 12 years. Mostly senior sysadmin stuff and project management. But when our ersatz president dropped his Titanium iBook on his boat -- right on the corner of the laptop, onto the teak, at which point it practically exploded into a shower of little and big parts -- he swept all of it into a plastic bag, everybody in IT took a look and just laughed, and I took it home and put it back together with Super Glue and two cabinet door hinges for the LCD.
I sent my 3790 back to Sager for warranty repair in August of 2005: the touchpad button was stuck and the ethernet port was bad. Both were fixed at no charge to me (except for my portion of the UPS shipping). Then I got a phone call from the technician stating that he would replace the LCD (WUXGA 1920z1600) for $150. I asked why the charge and he said that Sager couldn't replace screens that were /scratched/ -- he said there was a big scratch on the surface of the viewing area and he couldn't replace it under warranty because of the scratch so I gave him $150 to replace the screen. I figured what the hell- the screen was just starting to get a little dull and my screen suffered from the classic 3790 pressure dimple - and I didn't remember any scratch, especially as I use only the most expensive lens cloth and cleaner to clean my LCD displays.
6 weeks later my laptop returned to me, and the first thing I noticed was that the silver SAGER badge on the lid was scratched all to hell, as if my laptop had been sitting on it's back for a long time with no protection under, with grit under the badge.
And they charged me $150 for a new screen to replace a screen with a non-existent scratch and with a known quality problem (LCD dimple).
Sager, shame on you.
Regardless, I mustered my enthusiasm and started to use it -- and relatively hard, I admit. The CPU was max'xed out (1.7Ghz Pent M, 1GB RAM, 80GB Toshiba HD, DVD-+RW) for a good 14 hours out of the day as I rendered DivX video, mostly MST3k episodes.
I'm still running the original BIOS, AFAIK, and of course the CPU fan was set to always on by a strangely labelled BIOS setting -- I set the fan back to being thermostatically controlled and marvelled that the fan would shut off at times.
I entered the winter of 2005 with a relatively good feeling -- the laptop was working well, and I had just purchased an IOGEAR 320 external drive.
I used the USB 2.0 interface first, but I began to notice that my computer began to blue screen in XP - maybe once per week. Then I tried the FireWire interface, thinking to offload some of the processing power onto the FireWire hardware. My 3790 would not hold a firewire mount -- the mounted drive would disappear from My Computer at the worst possible times, either playing or ripping movies. I was forced to go back to USB 2.0 to get the mount to stick (320 external formatted as NTFS).
And then it began to go downhill. Instead of once a week, my 3790 began crashing once per day. I reinstalled XP. I ran Gibson's SpinRight. I ran SandraSoft and memtest86. I checked the SMART status on the drive -- it was good but I /thought/ I saw some bad clusters during a chkdsk /r run and so I bought another Toshiba 80GB from TigerDirect and installed XP again, and dual booted into Redhat FC9. Both operating systems, Linux and Windows, crashed once a day with no pattern. With Windows, it would be win32.sys or ntfs.sys or /REALLY BAD/ errors, BSODs I've never even heard of before, like upon login or even before login, strange severe errors, BSODs that didn't even dump memory to file -- I've never seen such BSODs. I've suffered through two this morning.
Linux (Redhat FC9) also dumps core and segfaults on an almost hourly basis, so I am starting to get the feeling that it's /not/ software.
The average failure rate of any given laptop model is like almost ridiculous, right? I mean they expect a very large percentage of units to fail in the field after purchase, and they expect people to either put up with long repair times or handle the problem themselves by either coping or repairing.
I purchased my Sager 3790 in August of 2004 from discountlaptops.com, a company I would entirely endorse from my great experience while also silently wondering about CompAmerica.com...my eyes wouldn't be wandering if my 3790 was behaving well.
I ordered my 3790 about 1 day before the typhoon hit Taiwan, causing my Clevo chassis to be late to Sager and held up my delivery by about 10 weeks: damn typhoon.
I've submitted my woes to Sager and we'll see.
For now, I'm lookign at comp.coamericam with wonderment and I'm thinking about fixing my 3790 and selling it, and purchasing a desktop/slim unit from compamerica.
Unless somebody can tell me that these promising Centrino Duo 2 chipsets are more reliable and run cooler, or if somebody could at least give me a vote of encouragement for nt totally ranting against Sager. They're trying, I'm trying, we're all trying.
