I've gone through two laptops, from two different companies. Never had any serious problems--well, i lie, one of hte hard drives went capoot after a year--except for the AC adaptor, and that was a chronic problem. I like how they charge you an arm and a leg for the AC adaptor, by the way--GOd forbid that they just make a universal ocmputer power standard, oh no, they have to make custom parts and custom fittings to force you to buy only their adaptor so they can ramp the price up to a truly ridiculous level.

Every time I leave the house I'm paranoid that one of the games are on. It's not unheard of for one of them, namely Tempest, to burst into flames.

I couldn't imagine being one of those people who have a Dell laptop and having about a [i]billion[/i] times the real risk. There was something floating around two days ago about a guy who lost everything because the Dell laptop caught fire on him. I have been using my laptop to be a large MP3 player that I take to work as of late and I keep it under a fire extinguisher and a bloc of cold paste just to be safe. AND IT'S A GATEWAY!

Well, not really [i]fixed[/i], per se. More like "told that it wasn't broken."

See, over the past few weeks it had been getting more and more finicky about drawing power from the cord. I would have to jiggle it around a bit to convince it to start working. I soon found myself forced into steadily more amusing positions to get the damn thing to draw power, until finally it quit working entirely. No amount of cajoling would convince it to work.

I asked around, and the general consensus was that the power supply jack had come loose from the motherboard; this is apparently a fairly common problem with laptops. I resigned myself to paying a rather hefty sum to have someone who knew what they were doing crack the thing open and shoot a gob of solder into it.

So I took it down to my local computer repair shop and explained the situation. The next day they called me and explained that the computer itself was fine, but the AC adapter was what was fucked up. They charged me $29 for the diagnostics and $125 for a snappy new universal AC adapter, with interchangeable plugs suitable for car or airplane use.

So I have full use of my laptop again, and I am out approximately $160. It's worth it to be able to play TrackMania again, though. :)