On Wednesday 03 December 2003 9:52 pm, Sebastian Wolff wrote:
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?
I doubt it. This sounds like the sort of things I heard when I was running OS/2 ( Warp4+ whatever it had got to when I stopped ) ANY and Every alleged computer hardware specialist would say when he couldn't find Autoexec.bat ... When I kept insisting it didn't NEED that file ( after all it's config.sys took care of all those items ususally located there.) He would look at me, shake his head, and begin talking accross me to my Husband, which was an error in judgement . My husband had no idea, I had been the family tech support for years... At some point in the various discussions they always said that the OS had damaged the hardware. Some of you will have heard this item : but I shall persist as it does have a point relevant to this discussion <g> As if that weren't bad enough , the ( also alleged ) tech suppport and IT guys at his job claimed that my sending an email from my os/2 computer to my husband on their lan ( at the job) would DAMAGE the hardware in their system, AND take the lan down so that it would require major work to get it up, it would also require replacing hardware !!! ( BTW they never knew when I did it anyway, guess they weren't very good at their jobs ) Scarey, folks get paid for that sort of thing.
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. I wish I knew exactly what steps you were taking when Linux "destroyed your laptops"
When did you push this reset button; after your laptop had fully booted ? HOW did you change bios settings? By actually hitting the F2 button , or in some other way?
Now I have 2 questions:
(1) What happened ???!
Only the gods know at present.
(2) Who can I sue for it?
right now, it would be folly to sue anyone , especially if, as a starving student you have not the cash to replace your dead laptop. Lawyers, especially those in Civil litigation often require huge amounts of cash. ( Huge , obviously, in relation to your obviously strapped state )
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.
Did you pay for your OS, or download it? As far as I know, no OS is required to be responsible for hardware failures. Otherwise, MS would not still be in business.