Susceptibility of Dell 8200 to thermal stress/fatigue?

[Eric Anderson]

David Wolfskill wrote:
[..snip..]

>>From ads on craigslist and eBay, it looks to me as if a Dell 8200 with a
>UXGA (1600x1200) screen ought to work out reasonably well -- better than
>the laptops in Dell's current catalogue, in that of the latter, only one
>has an integrated "standard" (for PCs) serial port.  (As a sysadmin, I
>sometimes need to connect to random devices that only talk serial.)
>[Yes, I could get a USB<->DB9 dongle; that's one more thing to lose or
>break, as well as pay for.]  I don't really care about a disk drive, as
>my old disk drive still works (I'm using it in the loaner laptop as I
>type).
>
>Now, it looks as if the Dell Latitude C840 is fairly similar to the
>Inspiron 8200.  As far as running FreEBSD on the machine, are there any
>salient differences?
>
>And does anyone have any ideas as to how susceptible either is to
>thermal stress?
>
>This comes into play because I keep a local copy of the FreeBSD CVS
>repository on my laptop, updated daily, and have been tracking RELENG_4
>as often as the corresponding working directory changed (usually,
>daily).  I had been tracking HEAD (on another slice) until RELENG_5 was
>branched, and I then tracked RELENG_5.  (I do have a slice for HEAD, but
>2 buildworlds in a day was eating into my time a bit much; 3 just
>wouldn't be feasible.  I'll probably resume tracking HEAD once I migrate
>my production machines at home to 5.x.)
>

For what it's worth, I have a Dell D600, and I do much of the same that 
you do on your laptop on mine - I've been using it hard for a year, with 
no ill effects..

Eric