Can Linux Os Ruin Laptops?

[oldos2er]

"Linux is made from millions of people."

Soylent Green is made from people!

Sorry, just had to chuckle at that....

[Dr Small]

My brother
went to IT in somewhere in California and anyways he works now
at Compusa.

Your brother won't work at CompUSA long... they are closing the last 100 that are still around.

http://lists.rmlug.org/pipermail/rml...er/003614.html
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/12/08/076226

[cwej]

I'm writing this on my System 76 (Pangolin) laptop. It replaced my old IBM T41 (pre-Lenovo) laptop, which I passed down to my son. Both run Ubuntu (the IBM has since 2006). Works great. Lasts a long time.

Now can a setting in an OS harm a computer? Sure. For example, if some an ill conceived setting (e.g., in fstab) causes your hard drive to constantly spin; or, if CPU is run over-clocked and chassis cooling is insufficient to compensate, eventual harm might ensue. The moral is don't do stupid stuff, regardless of OS. Ubuntu defaults to not-dumb. Users are free to override.

[BreathEasy]

Wasn't there a controversy a few years back how Mandrake Linux had something in the installer which had the potential to permanently KILL specific LG optical drives? From what I can remember it had something to do with the LG's firmware being non-standard and it wasn't really the fault of the distro, but then again, it happened, and Linux was the cause. So there.

[cwej]

OK. Anything is possible. Just to put this into perspective, I've replaced Windows with Linux on several of my kid's computers after WIndows eaten unrecoverably by adware, horribly screwed up registries, virus's, pwnd by virus attack, etc. Fewer problems with Linux than with Windows/DOS, and I've been "power user" since DOS 3.0...

[FuturePilot]

For what it's worth, I've been running Ubuntu on my Dell Inspiron 8200 laptop for almost 2 years and it's still going strong. Especially for as old as this thing is getting.

[HermanAB]

Yes, you can ruin a laptop if you turn ACPI and speed stepping off. With Windows it is more difficult to make that mistake.

So, if you are stupid, then you can ruin your laptop with Linux.

[macogw]

No OS, or any other piece of software, physically harms hardware. It just doesn't happen. I've never seen any evidence of it. I've never read any verifiable data that even suggests it.

There is ONE way I have heard of. One of my friends was trying to write a video card driver for Linux in 1992 because his card wasn't supported. In an attempt to figure out how the card worked so he knew how to program it, he sent power through each pin on the card. When he sent too much power through the wrong pin, it went up through the cable and blew up the monitor. He went through 3 monitors writing that driver XD

As long as you're not a teenage hacker attempting to write drivers for a piece of hardware you know nothing about, though....you'll be fine.

[Kzin]

Installing Ubuntu on one of my home boxes this weekend appeared to "fry" my drive. Upon further investigation, the time last weekend that my os that was on the drive crashed (prompting me to install Ubuntu on it), I found that the drive had reached well above 70 degrees Celsius. If I had left the corrupted os on there (Win 2000 if you're wondering) the drive would probably been able to limp along. The act of re installing an OS caused the firmware on the drive to allocate all of it's "spare" blocks, and the drive started reporting errors.
Bah.
I used Seagate's repair utility to repair the drive, and installed anyways. Not too smart because its just going to fail again soon, but hey, I know this drive is on borrowed time.

Point of this post? Well, the drive failed because of other reasons, not because I tried to install linux on it, even though to a less experienced user it could have seemed like it was because of linux.

Installing Ubuntu right now on an Alienware Area 51. I'll let you know how it goes.

[mips]

YES it can. I'm saying this as I'm no Linux zealot.

I will give you an example. With Feisty 7.04 on some Fujitsu(-Siemens) laptops there was a kernel issue where the cpu fan would not turn on at all. The laptop would boot, overheat, hang & reset. It got bloody hot to be honest and heat is no friend of electronic gear. I don't think it would have killed it outright but it would have shortened it's life.

The only major thing I would check for is to see if the fans turn on or not, this is very important but besides this I would not worry about it.

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=441036

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