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Notebooks for Rough People
snack writes "Hey guys, I was surfing around, and somehow I came across Panasonic Tough Book. These things look uber cool, magnesium casings and all. They've also got shock resistant lcd's and hard drives. Water proof, and dust proof. Very very kick ass." Okay. Finally I'm gonna jump on the Slashdot "I gotta have one of these!" bandwagon. (My tongue is hanging out as I type.) Update: Yes, we know hardened laptops aren't new, but this is an exceptionally slim, light, and cute one. -Roblimo
I know lots of people have already mentioned it's old news, but...
I saw one of these things about 4 years ago. A SBE I met had one that he claimed came from a military buddy of his.
Besides being durable and top-of-the-line (well, for the time period), it had a CD burner built in! Press a button and the entire motorized (no spring-action crap) keyboard raised up and the CD tray slid out from underneath! No BS!
Pretty damn cool for a laptop 4 years ago! (Any other mfg's doing that today?)
Actually, getting a coffee-resistant crotch is not so hard. Simply start out with water slightly above lukewarm, and tip a cup into your lap first thing every morning. If you make the water about half one degree hotter every day, soon you'll be able to withstand even fresh expresso poured steaming over the family jewels.
This is a great party trick. Once you are at the balls-of-steel stage, challenge an unpopular manager to an endurance contest. You'll be the life of the party.
Think of the buyers: Military ('natch), campers (not the Quake kind), off-road bikers, heavy-duty business travellers -- just about anyone who gets tossed around enough that their gear has to take a beatin' and keep on tickin'.
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Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
Magnesium is only flamable when it is in a powder form. (dont you remember making magnesium fires when you were little? oops that must have just been me). But magnesium is some pretty tough stuff.
Road cases rock. Most sound companies make their own, and will make custom ones for customers if asked. If you're looking for an excellent case for anything fragile, it might be worth your while to give those guys a visit.
Also, many case companies (I can think of Zero and Pelican off the top of my head) sell cases which come full of a big chunk of foam. The foam can be be modified by ripping cubes out it, giving a customised fit for your equipment.
I bought a cheap model (~$100) for carrying my electronic equipment around. Except my scope of course...
This one also has divider sections so I can haul out the entire block of foam, put in the dividers, and put my notebook in there and have lots of space for other things.
I usually carry my notebook around in my Kensington Saddlebag. I searched high and low trying to find a case that allowed me to put my notebook *and* at least two binders or books simultaneously. The only ones I could find locally were too big, designed for putting changes of clothes in there.
I used to have a job where rugged computers would have been nice to have. I ended up unplugging everything and moving the table away before any physical work was done on the machines. I later replaced it with a regular notebook, because it was easier to move out of the way.
I have the 12" dstn, which works well and uses a CT 65550 with 2MB ram, and works ok with Xfree. I understand the TFT CF-25's used a neomagic chip with one meg.
I've yet to get the cardbus to work with a 2.2 kernel, I'm using pcmcia-cs-2.9.12 with kernel 2.0.37. Oh, yah, and the serial port drops bytes, and I've read (on deja) that it drops bytes in some dos apps, too.
Also, the bios didn't understand my Linux partition, kept prompting me to stick in my Windblows cd, so I now boot a tiny dos partition, which runs loadlin. Poo!
I've opened mine up, and all the internals say "(c)IBM" all over them. It's pretty heavy duty inside. It's not just a mag case, the main body is a very heavy casting, with a mag cover that covers the disk and batt. compartment on the bottom, and a cover on the top deck that might be plastic. The HD sits in a jelly-like molded compartment, and is not screwed to anything. It took three minuts to stick in a bigger drive. There's a spot in the bottom for a SO-DIMM, which Panasonic claims is proprietory, but a generic worked for me.
On the good side, I've so far spilled coffee on it, carried it in a duffel with lots of other junk, dropped it down the stairs, stepped on it, dropped it off my desk while running, and dropped it from five feet a bunch of times to scare my co-workers, all without damage (although the black paint does scratch off eventually.) I'm kinda hard on laptops, and this one is holding up much better so far than any other one I've owned. The big benifit to me so far is that I just don't worry about breaking it, or bumping my bag into walls, or whatever.
That would mean that you could pay $100 for a really tough carrying bag...
I was in the luggage store at the Mall the other day. I did not get the brand, but, perhaps foolishly, I asked to see "better quality" cases for portable computers. Guess what? They have them upwards of $600.00.
That's Six Hundred Dollars. For a leather bag. Equipment cases can run even higher, like the stuff for professional audio/video gear.
The $600.00 laptop bag had a (PATENTED!) cradle for the computer. If you dropped the bag, the computer would not hit the cement floor because of the way it was suspended. I actually liked it. But there's no way I'd pay that much for a piece of luggage, much less a briefcase. It's just not my style.
Anyway, I'm just posting to let everybody know that $100.00 does not buy you a carrying bag that is considered high end.
I just thought about this, and realized I paid almost this much for my guitar case. If you want to be very damned sure that your $4000.00 guitar arrives at the airport in one piece, the price of a pro road case does not seem outrageous at all. I'm sure professional photographers have the same issues. Even more so. I can only imagine the stress engendered by travelling with a Panaflex lens worth $16000.00, and the rest of the equipment increasing in value from there.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
A couple years ago when I worked for a LARGE company, I was asked to test one out to see how tough it was. In the manual it stated that it could be dropped from a height of six feet. Curiosity got the best of me and I held it upto my eyes (only 5' 8" +/-) and dropped it. I then picked all of the pieces up, put them in the box and informed my manager that it wasn't so tough. I wonder if they ever took that statement out of the manual?
This kind of stuff has been around for years. I know of a New Zealand power company that have been using panasonic toughbooks for the last couple of years (their faultman use them as a map viewer - field GIS).
also check out the Fujitsu Stylistic series of pen based machines. These are based on mobile pentiums and are also solid as a rock. Mine has been for a swim in the goldfish pond with no problems. Dropped off the roof of the house (3.5 metres) with no problems.
There isn't a very market because of the cost. And that the tech lags behind standard laptops. You can get a 366mhz laptop but I doubt you'll find a 366mhz ruggedised laptop.
In New Zealand a good off the shelf laptop costs about NZ$4000 (US$2000), but a 266mhz toughbook costs about NZ$7000 (US$3500). The price difference is such that many organisations buy normal laptops for their field staff as even though they replace them more often than the ruggedised versions it still works out cheaper.
Cheers,
Adam.