Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (3983 mails)

[Sebastian Wolff <sebastian.wolff@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dear SuSE community!

This is a call for help and a troll against linux.

Is it possible that in particular situations Linux may kill the main board of 
any laptop?

By now I destroyed with the help of SuSE Linux 8.2 and 9.0 2 (!) laptops in the 
last 2 month: An older Maxdata and a brand new Dell Inspiron 5100. Both show 
the same symptoms:

They simply don't react after turning the power on (except turning on the fan 
and the CD drive). The repair service believes it is the main board which must 
be replaced.

And each time the 'damage' resulted from similar situations (the first time I 
believed it was the age of my laptop):

I wanted to change the BIOS configuration. To enter the setup you have to press 
F2 in the very beginning. Usually I miss this time. Hence, I resetted the 
computer after missing it. However, I am used to damages to the file system in 
the worst case - therefore, to press reset is a very common and intuitive way.

Well. Sometimes it can also kill your whole hardware. 

Now I have 2 questions:

(1) What happened ???!

(2) Who can I sue for it?

After all this operating system (really, I liked it till now) destroyed a value 
of 2500 Euro (2700 $) within only 2 month! As a student I can live with that 
money for a whole year - and then I wanted to finish a research project next 
week - 3 complete month of work are gone now.
Now, this is a 'free' operating system. Who is responsible? Linus Torvalds? 
SuSE? The developer who produced this bug? Rather nobody. After this incident I 
have to define 'reliability' in a new sense. This warranty problem might be a 
reason to encourage companies to stay at Windows, HP-UX or MacOS.

Regards
Sebastian