Two notebooks vs. coffee, nails and sawdust
A couple of rugged new PC notebooks prove they can stand up at even the toughest job sites. Have you found a notebook that survives tough conditions? Tell us about it.
From HS, Dallas, TX I own HP Pavillion TX1000. I fell from stairway while holding my laptop turned-on and dropped my laptop very hard on hardwood floor. In my entire life, I never dropped my laptop that hard. I thought it would be immediately dead/crash on the scene but it works normally like nothing ever happened. No scratch, no dent, no failure whatsoever. It still works like charm. I am a BIG loyal fan to HP now.
From Mike, Mason City, IA The US Navy uses the Panasonic Toughbooks on submarines, we dropped one 25' onto a metal floor with no problems!
From gid, Houston, Texas We use the Dell laptop for our shop floors (we build and service specialized tools). While we were evaluating it, one of our Canadian managers decided to do the drop test with the laptop off of a 10 foot ladder. It survived the first 4 with no worries, but the 5th time caused the harddisk to fail. Does that mean the units sucked? No…since it was a test unit, Dell put in the wrong speced harddisk…they put in a regular one. Once returned with the correct harddisk installed, everything worked like a charm.
I have been using toughbooks in teaching undergraduate and graduate field geology courses for 7 years. We have had a variety of computers including 17's, 34's, 18's, 19's, and a 30. Although students can be rough on them, we have never had one go down, period. They have been used for research mapping at lot of different conditions (Tibet, Antarctica, Ethiopia, Saudi, all over the western hemisphere) with no problems.