I agree the original aspire ones are cracking wee machines and we haven't had a problem with any of ours. I have 3 in the engineering hangar because they have RS232 ports. Apart from the black screen of death happening every so often. But you just re-blow the BIOS and it works again.
Its the consumer laptops which seem to have taken a nose dive over the last 4-5 years. Especially the G versions.
When they come new out of the box and they are just sitting there doing nothing the temps are up over 65-70. And over the two years they just seem to go up and up. Cool pads and spacers to keep the fan clear don't seem to make a difference. Two years later they are up over 80 at idle and anything mindly graphical and it will thermally shut down.
The gf's brother got one recently against my advice because it was 600 quid for a 7i with a NVidia GPU so in theory he could play half decent games on it and the first thing I did was strip it down and put a copper shim in between the GPU and CPU heat sink and replaced the thermal paste. The copper bridge from the GPU is under 1cm wide by 5mm thick. The first time he played a game on it the temp was over 85 deg now with the shim and new paste its a more respectable 70degs.
My ROG asus G750 sits at 45degs normally and goes up to 65 degs when kicking the backside out of it on ultra settings in tombraider. The only way to get the temps above that and the fans to kick in is to use a benchmark prog. But it does weigh nearly twice as much and costs 400 quid more but does have a bigger screen etc.
Last edited by mad_jock; 17th April 2014 at 10:24.