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Dell Rugged Laptops Not Quite Tough Enough
An anonymous reader writes "Trusted Reviews has put the new Dell XFR rugged laptop through the grinder and it hasn't fared as well as expected. Considering that these guys drove a car over a Panasonic Toughbook, they went pretty easy on the Dell, but it still couldn't take the punishment. It looks like Dell still has a way to go to steal the ball from Panasonic when it comes to all terrain computing."
So the Dell blends after all!
But as for ruggedness testing, do you think that they were going a little overboard? I have been using my Latitude D810 for about four years now, have dropped it multiple times at the airport, the wife stepped on it while the lid was shut, and my aging cat urinated on the keyboard. Thing is that it still works. I am impressed with Dell's quality for the higher-end models made to withstand abuse. I would have bought two or three HPs in the time that I have had my Latitude. End of story for me.
I've seen Panasonic Toughbooks in police cars, fire trucks, and in the vehicles of industrial companies, but I guess I don't get why; the laptops are well protected in the car or truck, and it's not like a cop is going to use it as a shield in a shoot out, or a fireman is going to be typing something inside a burning building. When a plumber came over to fix some pipes, he brought with him a battered Compaq laptop that was missing several keys, looked like it'd gone through hell, but was still working and wasn't "ruggedized" in any way I could tell.
This is pure ignorance on my part...I can appreciate there is very likely a need, or they wouldn't make them, but I really don't know what that need is; especially, under what circumstances would it be possible to get my laptop run over by a truck as part of a normal day?
That said, they definitely *look* cool and wouldn't mind having one myself, especially if I thought I'd need to check my email outside, in a snowstorm, in the Sierra Madre. :)
Er, what? This Slashdot summary does not jive with the article at all. The laptop was perfectly functional after all of their tests. The only problems they had were a minor cosmetic issue of the adhesive coming off around the trackpad (which they just called "fit and finish") and that some of the doors might pop open during drops since they weren't double locked. Their conclusion was that it was indeed quite rugged.
Did they compare the Dells to regular Thinkpads? They're not officially ruggedized, but they can take an awful lot of punishment.
Incidentally, I just had a book shelf collapse under its load of books (apparently I wasn't supposed to stack them that high) and fall on my open Macbook. Huge dent next to the keyboard, but everything works fine.
Dell seems to be taking a very different tack than Panasonic in this segment. Dell's target market seems to be military applications, which can be the only explanation for the high performance CPU and video card. Panasonic is targeting more mundane in-car law enforcement terminals, hospital information systems, and things like power meter readers.
It's no surprise that the military customers would require a lower ruggedness spec than civilian users. They have no real budget limit, the computers are typically damaged beyond repair if damaged at all, and the PCs are typically immobile. However, they need to run fast and well when running, so the good CPU and graphics chip are musts.
Civilian usage, OTOH, requires a device that is durable and lasts for years and can be used in any environment. They don't need great processing power, they just need something that can run their dedicated apps well enough. This is where Panasonic's focus on hardware quality really shines.
According to the moderation history, nobody did. I believe TrisexualPuppy starts at a score of -1, probably due to his long and illustrious history of trolling and being modded down for it.
A regular laptop won't start up at -40 after a North Dakota night. The toughbook says "Please wait, warming up" on the BIOS screen while it pre-warms the hard drive. It also works just fine when it's baking in the sun at 150, whereas the old Dell I had would crash at those temperatures.
I couldn't help but notice that in the video the guy pulled up the dot mouse thing, in the keyboard and there was a gap when he pushed down on the mouse pad. if they are going to market these as rugged laptops they should try to seal them a bit better.
Its not my fault, someone put a wall in my way.
Laptops are weak. They should be able to defend themselves against dangers such as smashing into the ground, like this experimental Lenovo model.
"Stop failing the Turing test!" -- Dilbert
We used to believe that the ToughBooks were the end all be all of ruggedized computers; that is until the day someone actually managed to break one!
If you read the warranty statement from Panasonic you will see the following under Section 3 - Limited Warranty Exclusions
"Failures which result from alteration, accident, misuse, introduction of liquid or other foreign matter into the unit, abuse, neglect, installation, maladjustment of consumer controls, improper maintenance or modification, use not in accordance with product use instructions"
That means that if your coffee somehow spills on the laptop and fries the motherboard Panasonic will not repair it under warranty!
On the other hand if you purchase a Dell or an HP ruggedized notebook with the accidental damage protection the notebook will be repaired with no questions asked.
Considering the cost of the Panasonic ToughBooks, I would take a Dell XFR + CompleteCare any day!
Besides, regardless of what notebook you own, if you roll over it with your vehicle (by accident) and it happens to break, would you not rather be covered?
This is pure ignorance on my part...I can appreciate there is very likely a need, or they wouldn't make them, but I really don't know what that need is; especially, under what circumstances would it be possible to get my laptop run over by a truck as part of a normal day?
Not so much run over by a car but and decent sized IT dept will probably tell you that people abuse the hell out of laptops. Most of them quickly accumulate a veritable junkyard of spare parts from laptops that have been killed through various acts of neglect, malfeasance and random accidents. I've personally seen laptops get destroyed in countless ways. It's a fairly safe bet that a field service technician or traveling consultant is probably going to beat his laptop up pretty quickly. I've had a few clients myself where I wished I had something a little more rugged. We had one guy who killed 3 laptops in the space of a month through various acts of stupidity.
I don't know that I'd get a toughened notebook for someone irresponsible. Sometimes firing the guilty party is sometimes cheaper. But I've seen plenty of cases where a toughened laptop is a good idea.
For policemen or many industrial companies, where if your computer went down it shouldn't delay service by much, or the service would be cheap to reschedule, using a regular laptop makes sense.
But for other uses, like firemen or refinery maintenance technicians, who need to refer to building schematics and hazardous material contents before they decide how to attack a fire, or need to see maintenance documents to repair a piece of equipment keeping the refinery down at a cost over $100,000/hour, only a Toughbook or similar would do.
I worked for the county sheriff's office for several years as an IT / network guy and can tell you that the more durable laptops are DEFINITELY useful in the police context. No matter how often you tell them to be careful or even discipline them, cops will be cops, and most of them are pretty rough around the edges. They toss their notebooks around, drop them, spill coffee on them, you name it. We had one notebook in for updates and servicing that looked like it had fallen into a threshing machine. My coworker asked the officer what the HELL he'd done to it, and he defensively said that HE hadn't done anything to it. It was his K9 partner who had decided to use it as a chew toy, not his problem. At least it stall ran. Oh, and we did have one stop a bullet, although nobody was actually in the car at the time.
Did they compare the Dells to regular Thinkpads? They're not officially ruggedized, but they can take an awful lot of punishment
Depends on your definition of "awful lot". My brother-in-law's previous company has used thinkpads as their primary laptops for years and the consultants there managed to kill plenty of them. A shocking number actually. I agree that Thinkpads have historically been well constructed - I've had several myself. But they aren't *that* tough. Certainly not much tougher than most other non-ruggedized machines.
Dude, where's my car?
Dude, you're NOT getting a (working) Dell!
Considering the cost of the Panasonic ToughBooks, I would take a Dell XFR + CompleteCare any day!
You are missing the point. If you happen to work in any sort of extreme environment (very hot, very cold, very dusty, etc) your Dell is going to die pretty quickly if it even works at all. Furthermore there are jobs where equipment failure has serious consequences. The point is that it doesn't die in the first place, not that you can replace it. Take a standard laptop on a polar expedition or into the middle of a desert and getting your laptop serviced isn't exactly going to be an option you can exercise. And thanks to our good friend Murphy odds are it will break at the least convenient time possible.
Ruggedized laptops aren't for office workers. They are for people who work very far from climate controlled offices.
at least the dell has better video then intel GMA why can most systems like this have that? there are people who do cad work who may need a system like this.
I dunno man, I'd rather buy a notebook from a company that knows how to make things rugged, verses a company that makes VCR's and questionable quality audio products.
So much for the "DoD's MIL-STD 810F heat, dust and vibration requirements"*
It looks cool as shit, but that's about it. I guess the only requirement to meet DoD specs is testosterone appeal.
[*] -
http://www.engadget.com/2009/03/09/super-rugged-latitude-e6400-xfr-is-tougher-than-you/
boycott slashdot February 10th - 17th check out: altSlashdot.org
I work for a small police department, and did considerable research before choosing the Toughbook. They're certainly not made for speed, and they're heavy and ugly. But they're not made for that, they're made to take the abuse that is almost inevitable in the hands of people who are, shall we say, not exactly delicate flowers.
Before actually mounting these computers in our cruisers, I dropped the Toughbook while holding it above my head (I'm about 5'10"), I punched the back of the screen (only succeeded in giving myself a bloody knuckle), poured hot coffee on the keys, and generally did things you would REALLY not want to do to your laptop. They took it with just little scratches here and there, but no issue other than cosmetic.
One thing I did find is was that, of course, the screen is tough but it's still a laptop screen. The clamps used to mount the laptops on a swing arm in the cars goes slightly over the sides of the Toughbook. If the screen is slammed hard, that can actually cause a crack. Fortunately I'd paid the extra dosh for a better warranty covering such things, and was able to remind the officers that they need to be aware of that issue.
Dells offerings are really GOOD laptops, and not bad if you need rugged, but not insanely durable. I finally settled on the Toughbook not just because of the abuse I put them through, or just from asking other local PDs what they used. One of my users, a recent hire only a year or so out of the Army Rangers, told me that the Toughbook are what they jumped out of aircraft with. The abuse a grizzled old geek like myself can throw at a computer is pretty much NOTHING like what an Army Ranger could do.
So far, the TBs have been worth every penny we spent.
Actually, if you look at the OP's history, his posts are always followed by an AC message asking it to be modded up. Either a big coincidence, or Trisexualpuppy is trying to draw attention and upmods to his own posts.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
The five-finger discounter. One operation bought two of the $3,000 beasts and one walked. They got another and it walked too! The last one they got I got them a cable lock and LoJack service. I slapped LoJack stickers all over both of them. That put the kibosh on the thefts.
First rule of holes; When in one, stop digging.
Unfortunately, even when he gets upmods, he can't resist trolling for long enough to stay above -1 for long.
Since Dell has taken over from emachines as the computers built with the cheapest (and crappiest!) parts available, what do you expect?
And lest you forget, there's always more pee where that came from.
some years ago, my backpack's zipper failed and thus unloaded my 15" iBook down a whole flight of stairs; my heart stopped as I watched it bounce up and down every couple of steps (on its edges), all the way to the ground floor!
Once I unbent the hook that would normally lock it when closed, it worked just like new!
"Not quite evil enough"
"It's a doughnut stuffed with M&M's. That way when you finish the doughnut, you don't have to eat any M&M's."
I've designed systems where over 20,000 of these were deployed. Hourly workers treat all their tools, like tools. Whether it is a hammer or a computer, doesn't matter. It gets thrown back into the toolbox when they are done. They are not particularly gentle and you can't expect them to be. The computers need to continue working in rough, jarring, hot, vibration prone, sunlit, humid, and freezing temperatures. We used both Itronix and Panasonic tough books. We looked at Dell, but there stuff was a joke.
Even with specs to support all these different environments, we had to purchase 15% more to handle breakage issues. The hard drives were overheating even though our users were well within the operating temperature specifications.
I believe that an average college student is fairly careful compared to our workers with laptops. I've seen multiple laptops left on the back of a truck, then seen the truck drive off and the laptop bounce to the road. A college student wouldn't do that more than once in a life. We've had technicians do something like that multiple times. If they get back and pick up the laptop, it still works.
For anyone who may think carting these around for business travel is fun - forget it. They weight double what even laptop-replacement models weigh and usually only have low end CPUs.
More and more industrial users are changing from laptops to handhelds or even iPhones to reduce the total cost of ownership. Remote access is such a huge productivity enhancer, that some kind of remove computing is necessary almost regardless of the cost.
We have Tough Books for our EMS service. I've seen them dropped, stepped on, tossed in the back of a truck or stretcher, everything. I've personally dropped my Tough Book and didn't even think to say "oh no!" - I knew it was going to be ok. They may be expensive, but I know from personal and professional experience, they hold up excellent.
This story reminds me of the tail of the Compaq salesman when they first started making "portable" computers. He would walk into a sales presentation and slide the portable across the floor into the wall pick it up and turn it on and go on with his presentation.
This is pure ignorance on my part... under what circumstances would it be possible to get my laptop run over by a truck as part of a normal day?
I remember one summer when I was working in Boston and saw a fella riding his bike down one of the cobbled streets with his laptop, sans cover or bag, strapped to the rear bike rack with a single bungie cord. At the time, I saw a lot of folks with laptops strapped to bikes, just not usually this poorly protected.
After one particularly hard bounce, his laptop shot out of its bungie and flew a short distance before falling to the street. By the time he stopped his bike to retrieve it, it was already too late--he turned around just in time to watch a truck run it over.
All I can remember thinking at the time was two things:
1) How I couldn't wait to get back from lunch to tell everyone my first personally observed laptop horror story (I worked in MIS at the time, and we saw all sorts of sorry states of stinkpads, always accompanied by the most amazing stories.)
2) One bungie cord--that's the best he could do?
As has been said, certain folks seem accident prone, and some just plain dumb. I don't know if this guy learned his lesson or not for his replacement, but I can easily see how someone who rides their bike with their laptop attached would benefit from the extra insurance a more durable laptop can give.
Until progress stops, I'll always be a webn00b.
thanks dude for the review.
http://www.buyergen.com
"Trusted Reviews" indeed...
I am very sucseptible to "let's have another drink"
Once I unbent the hook that would normally lock it when closed, it worked just like new!
You mean all your own files were missing?
...is that Quasimodo is presenting the Dell laptop. Seriously, did you see the video? Disney's lawyers are gonna have a field day on this one!