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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!
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.
*shrugs*
I accidently dropped my wifes Dell laptop from at least 4 feet. It survived and still runs just fine.
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.
Whether it fell off a couch or a cement wall, isn't it more important what it is falling onto instead of what it is falling off of?
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."
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.
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!
Yea...just stupid in general.
of course, if you had the hot spare marked somehow, I don't believe pulling that out would cause a rebuild.
Wear and tear on the chassis and sled, yes, and still counts as stupid, since this is IT, and one in a million things happen every day.
Check out my sysadmin blog!
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 accidently dropped my wifes Dell laptop from at least 4 feet. It survived
What's more important is that you obviously survived to post this tale. Sir, please mail me when you divorce because for the love of all that's sacred, I will propose this fine woman.
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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...