Hi folks,

Does anyone have any experience with 'rugged laptops'? I have a friend who is trying to spec something for use in the field where it will be exposed to dust, dirt, rain, oil etc. They carry out geo-technical surveys so it could well end up sitting next to hole boring rigs and similar muck-chucking equipment.

If anyone has any recommendations, esp wrt TerraLogic kit, then I'd be most grateful.

Thanks, in advance,
Steve

Well, I am not that familiar with them. But a search for any "mil spec" laptops on google might help a bit.

The company you were asking about has some pretty interesting things. My favorite is the arm keyboard. It must be horrible to touch type on, though...



Edit: Weird. That displayed correctly in the preview...
Edit: fixed. -wfaulk

My employer used to use older versions of the Panasonic Toughbooks which were pretty cool. They gave us a sample that we used to take turns dropping from 6 feet to see if we could break it, it was pretty... uhh... tough. We ended up not using them for our field workforce because they were too expensive over the long haul. They'd be something to check out, though.

Wow, Paul. That was crazy. You had double-quotes in your URL which seemed to be breaking the link. So I replaced them with """s, but that didn't change anything. When I went to edit it again, it had changed the """s back to double-quotes. So I replaced the double-quotes with "%2522" in the hopes that it would interpret and change the "%25" to a percent sign and leave it as """, and it did and it worked. Very strange.

I second Panasonic Toughbooks. One of my friends bought one for doing some field testing stuff. It was out in the desert, lots of sand/dirt/dust and treated rather 'roughly'. No problems at all. This was quite a few years ago, so I'm not sure if there is anything better now though.

- Tim