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Dell's Rugged Laptop Doesn't Quite Pass 4-Foot Drop Test
narramissic writes "Dell's new Latitude E6400 XFR laptop is designed to withstand drops, dust and high pressure water spray. The company claims the laptop, which is intended for military use, can withstand rain and wind gusts of up 70 mph, and can work in temperatures from -20 to 145 degrees Fahrenheit. It can also work for an hour at an altitude of 15,000 feet and is designed to withstand drops of around 4 feet (48 inches) when not operating and 36 inches when operational. The LCD screen floats a little bit within the LCD cover so it can take impacts and shock, said Jeremy Bolen, a Dell spokesman. But watch as the laptop that Dell used to show these features wasn't able to withstand the rough treatment that was part of the company's demonstration."
Maybe this is considered just a semi-rugged class of laptop, because personally I would expect a "rugged" laptop to endure a much longer drop than that.
Many years ago, I had a sales rep who sold me Nissan thermos bottles. During one of his visits, he showed me (not to try to sell it to me, but because he thought I'd think it was cool) a new titanium dent-proof bottle that was really light and marketed at cyclists. When it came to demonstrating that it was dent-proof, he took his sample in hand and whacked it three times on one of my tables. "Now watch, those dents will just pop right out." Well, by the time he left, those dents were still there. In fact, he recently sent that bottle to me. The dents are still there.
Another sales rep was showing off glasses that didn't break when dropped. She demonstrated this by flinging the glass across the shop. While the glass didn't break, she did say, "One of these days I'm not going to get away with that."
The lesson: shit happens in product demos.
Remember RFC 873!
what they mean by "Dell Hell". Please, correct me if I'm wrong.
Dell is noteworthy for their crappy materials. Even most standard notebooks (especially older PowerBook and Thinkpads) can withstands 3-6 feet drops without a problem. I had a Dell once that couldn't withstand a 1 feet drop from a couch.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Reminds me of Napoleon Dynamite, when Kip is selling tupperwear and he drives over one with a van to show its strength, and it just completely bursts. He just says "dang" and drives away.
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
I like the ballistic armor (spectra flex/kevlar)...makes me want to shoot a Dell with a 9mm STEN.
Trust me, shooting a Dell without the armor is orders of magnitude more satisfying.
Did anyone catch "Attack of the Show" last night? They showed another one of these increasingly trendy "drop proof" laptops. Every time they dropped it (even from just two or three feet), the battery and dvd drive went flying off (requiring a reboot and, of course, costing you any unsaved data).
The problem with many of these things is that they build bullet-proof titanium super-duper-armour plating for the shell, but use the same old components for the hard drives, battery connections, drive bay connections, etc. The skin of the thing is the LEAST problematic part. I'm more interesting in how you built the hard drive than the SKIN. An adamantium skin won't help your laptop survive if it's using some standard off-the-shelf hard drive and battery.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Really, I am sure if I pushed my laptop off the table - fairly carefully - it would probably survive the fall, if that fall was softened by a carpet... and I could buy several laptops for the price Dell are asking for their super tough, macho, carpet loving laptop.
[nt]
I think id be neat to have one of these, although i wouldnt want to drop it. Ive had my Dell inspiron for 5 years now, ad still works great. Although i have never dropped it and treat it like a baby. Its too bad people are saying Dell is going down hill. Ive never had a problem with mine, and i know of alot of satified customers. I guess i might have to look around when i go to buy my next laptop, if dell is going to be going cheap.
Go go Gadget Nailgun!
What are you running on them?
I had a small-shop custom-built job years ago with Win2K on it, and Windows would go belly-up hard-reboot with depressing and increasing frequency, necessitating a complete wipe every couple months, after which the reboot-X-days-later cycle would restart with X as a larger, though shrinking, number. Later I installed Red Hat on it with Windows in a VM (required for certain software, >sigh...<) and it worked like a charm. Turned out the mobo's SMART controller was borked in some subtle way that killed Windows, but Linux was smart enough to find the mobo error and work around it (confirmed in dmesg).
I'm not saying your shitload of Dell OptiPlex 700 series desktops all have borked mobos, but maybe some BIOS setting or Windows driver isn't playing nicely?
(Disclaimer: I own a Dell and have had generally good luck with it, but I'm no apologist. My own machine is a Dimension 5150, and I was bothered to learn that, despite a 64-bit CPU, the chipset is limited to 32-bit memory addressing. How stupid!)
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
I was working on the firmware for a MIL-spec tablet. We had a requirement for a 5-foot drop non-operating and 3-foot drop operating.
The weight of the shock absorbers on that thing was insane -- added at least 2-3 pounds.
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
Dell responded to the crack by saying that the demo laptop was a pre-production model that had already been dropped a hundred times.
If that's the case I'm a little impressed. LCD screens are depressingly fragile.
Looks more like a rebadged Panasonic Toughbook than a Dell.
I have the previous generation ATG (D630). It's Dell's entry level "ruggedish" laptop. The monitor is fantastic and the general quality is good (which is the main reason I bought it) However it does have some design issues. The most important one being that the HDD is screwed directly to the external metal chassis. This means ANY sharp jolt to the laptop can destroy your drive. That's exactly what happened to me. I'd just closed the lid when I dropped it at most a half inch back onto the counter. That was enough to kill it.
The ironic thing is that a regular plastic Dell would have protected the drive better by flexing and transmitting less of the shock. I installed an SSD a couple days ago that should bypass this design flaw once and for all. BTW the OCZ Apex is KICKASS!
There's a three-year warranty on the machine and a cracked screen will be replaced immediately
FTS:
The company claims the laptop, which is intended for military use, can withstand rain and wind gusts of up 70 mph, and can work in temperatures from -20 to 145 degrees Fahrenheit.
Will they replace it immediately when someone drops it from 4 feet in a warzone, in heavy rain and heavy wind, while it's -20 degrees Fahrenheit?
(Note: I have no idea how much -20 degrees Fahrenheit is since I'm only familiar with Celcius and Kelvin. But I guess it's... pretty cold, maybe?)
Someday, the VIP's secretary's server access will immediately slow to a crawl since it was a RAID-5 the idiot pulled the drive out of.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
To heck with that wimpy drop test... what we really want to know is Will it blend?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Always, always do the drop test.
Fair enough. OTOH, if you have access to adamantium, you probably also could just use a brick with a +3 data storage bonus, rather than a hard drive.
I'm curious how altitude affects the laptop, but too lazy to research. Anyone? Anyone?
"But watch as the laptop that Dell used to show these features wasn't able to withstand the rough treatment that was part of the company's demonstration."
I watched, and the laptop survived just find. Stayed on and worked after all test. Am I a blind idiot and missing something, or is narramissic just retarded?
I have dropped a plain old Latitude D630 while it was powering on from approx. 4 feet up and it didn't miss a beat. It even got whacked on the end of a table on its way down.
Yep, one drop from about 2 feet up spelled the end of an old laptop's LCD. Lesson learned? If kids start trying to do laps around your laptop / projector combo just slap 'em silly until they quit. Keep 'em off your lawn too.
You are using English. Please learn the difference between loose and lose; they're, there, and their; your and you're.
It's all kind of B.S. anyway... if you do even simple back-of-the-envelope calculations on the forces involved with a corner impact from 4 feet, it's clear that you'd need several inches of padding, which would make your "laptop" look like one of those old suitcase Compaqs.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Water freezes at 32F, so yeah -20F is a bit chilly. Northern Minnesota nerd checking in.
If it's -20 f, you don't have rain. you have hard snow.
-20f is right around -29C. yeah, that's fscking cold. Deep storage freezer cold. And if they'll do field swaps in that environment, I'll order two.
If we can design electronic systems to survive gun launch (thousands of Gs) environments, it shouldn't be that difficult to design a laptop that can be dropped a few feet. Granted these things cost much more than a computer, but still...
Makes sense really, it would be pretty dumb to drop a brand new laptop for each presentation..
This laptop can survive wind gusts of 70mph? I should hope so. I should also hope it would survive wind gusts of 88mph, or 100mph. I'm reasonably certain that every computer I've ever owned, from my lowly C64 all the way up to my current quad-core beast, could survive wind gusts of 70mph.
BTW, how fast does the air out of those duster cans spray? Just curious...
Dell's new Latitude E6400 XFR laptop is designed to withstand drops, dust and high pressure water spray. The company claims the laptop, which is intended for military use, can withstand rain and wind gusts of up 30 m/s, and can work in temperatures from -28 to 62 degrees Celsius. It can also work for an hour at an altitude of 4500 m and is designed to withstand drops of around 120 cm when not operating and 90 cm when operational. The LCD screen floats a little bit within the LCD cover so it can take impacts and shock, said Jeremy Bolen, a Dell spokesman. But watch as the laptop that Dell used to show these features wasn't able to withstand the rough treatment that was part of the company's demonstration.
I don't see the crack in the video, where is it?
On impact, force equals mass by deceleration too... ;-)
"Because of the metric system"
FWIW
I remember a few times I left my ThinkPad in the car overnight when I still lived in SE Michigan. At about 0 degrees the screen tend to blur when moving the pointer around but it worked fine and cleared up in a few minutes. My only concern with the whole thing was bringing it into a warm environment tended to cause it to sweat. I often thought that would cause long term problems with the stuff inside but it never did.
Granted -20 is a whole lot colder than 0. I've been in both.
Illiterate? Write for free help!
My run of the mill thinkpad has operated at the summit of Mauna Kea (~14,000 ft) many times. I've personally also used a Gateway laptop, and a couple of seagate 2.5" harddrives up there. I know of many people who have used other laptop models there as well, and have never heard of any problems. The pressure difference between 14000 ft and 150000 ft is only about 15%.
I strongly suspect Dell just pulled the 15,000 ft number out of their rear because some marketing person thought it sounded neato.
I used to work in a job where we got daily weather reports from equipment in Antarctica. One winter day a station reported -75C.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
So you'll have to drop a laptop from table height roughly once a year to make this economical compared to a run-of-the-mill machine?
thegodmovie.com - watch it
Anyone have an alternative video link?
Video won't load for me, but the article seems to.
During a laptop demonstration provided by Dell, the laptop weathered jetted water and 3-foot drops while running, but the non-operational 4-foot drop proved to be a problem. After a third drop from 4 feet, the LCD screen's protective plastic cover shattered.
Dell responded to the crack by saying that the demo laptop was a pre-production model that had already been dropped a hundred times. There's a three-year warranty on the machine and a cracked screen will be replaced immediately, Bolen said.
Despite the screen crack, the laptop is protected by a chassis made of ballistic armor, which is a high-strength substance used in ballistic missiles, cryogenics and other military applications. It is a high-end polymer that is two to three times more durable than the magnesium alloy material used on most laptops today, Bolen said.
Where's the problem?
I recently dropped my Touring machine by accident and it survived unharmed. That's what I call robust!
$4K for a crappy laptop with "armor"? These guys must be on crack. Dude, I'm so not getting a Dell.
Huh. I dropped my OLPC from about 4 feet (a little less, maybe 3.5 with some forward momentum too) just a week ago. It bounced to about 1.5-2 feet, then landed again. Outdoors, hard asphalt. No damage except a tiny depression in the plastic on one corner.
Not the first time I've dropped it, either. Only thing I've broken from a drop is a tiny chunk of plastic off the headphone jack--in a ~6 foot drop onto a tile floor that hit the wall and my leg and thus didn't get the full force, but did manage to bend the 1/8th inch headphone connector.
Sounds like Dell has some catching up to do.
There are 11 types of people in the world: those who can count in binary, and those who can't.
i sure hope Dell sue slashdot for this misleading article , the laptop was fine, i watched the video, the bit that was loose was the stylus which you see later in the Video, slashdot has zero credability left.