Desperately seeking my intelligent other half

October 24, 2007 8:40 PM

WANTED : Laptop for a gorilla.

What is wrong with me? Why do they all keep leaving me like this. Yes ok so I punched this wimpy little Thinkpad and now it just refuses to boot. But it deserved it - believe me. Why do they have to be so precious about a bit of enthusiastic handling?

I need a laptop who loves for me who I am. Who loves me when I shake it around a bit, that forgives me when I roll on top of it in my sleep, that doesn't get all hurt when I drop it on the carpet every now and then, and that will forgive my questionable personable habits.

Im really not asking for much. I just need a 2Ghz CPU - doesn't have to do ultra-sexy graphics for me and I definitely wont play games with it. A sturdy proven work-horse that enjoys it a bit rough and that won't abandon me in times of need. Is there any one out there?

posted by zaebiz to computers & internet (12 comments total)

Panasonic Toughbooks. I have an old Pentium 266 machine that's been kicked around for a few years now, still going...
posted by pupdog at 8:46 PM on October 24, 2007

My brother worked a job that entailed dragging laptops in and out of barns filled with cows and everything that comes with them - he was given a Toughbook as well. It seemed to do the trick for him.
posted by davey_darling at 8:52 PM on October 24, 2007

When I say kicked around, I should clarify - It's actually served as a 'coffee table' laptop, the 'oh, look that guy up in imdb' or some such machine. Set on the floor, kicked, slid across the carpet, bumped off the leg of the couch... I've carried it on the train with no bag (it's got a handle built in), whacked it around the streets of NYC by it's built-in handle without a padded bag or anything... It's fallen off tables onto the floor (closed) and survived fine.
posted by pupdog at 8:59 PM on October 24, 2007

Find a used iBook. They're light, so it's a little gravity-resistant. Not a lot of holes in it-anecdotally they seem to fare well in little spills. Clamps shut and just becomes this featureless slab--nothing to catch or hang. No protrusions.
posted by sourwookie at 9:04 PM on October 24, 2007

I've dropped my Powerbook G4 1.5 metres onto a concrete floor. Has a huge dent in it, but works fine! It's been dropped on pavement a couple of times, plus just regular household floors, but for some reason it's just extremely resilient! Never so much as crashed.
posted by mjao at 10:34 PM on October 24, 2007

I've got a Toughbook 72 in my lap right now, and it's not that tough. The 2x series is much beefier, and highly recommended. In general the Toughbooks with handles are pretty strong, where the stylish ones without handles are stronger than most laptops but not necessarily worthy of the Toughbook name.

I've owned a 25 (p-150, 32 meg, loved it to death, finally sold it), a couple 17s (cel-300, 128 meg, adore them, sold two and parted one out), a couple m34s (same chassis as the 17, p3-700, 192 meg, love them to death, working on modding one now), and the 72 I'm currently typing on (p3-1066, 768 meg, cracked touchscreen, not impressed).

In the way of anecdotes: Sitting in the art lab while my female companion chipped away at a piece of stone, I found little bits of grit flying into my keyboard. All the humans wore safety glasses, the equipment wasn't so lucky. It was getting under the keys and really making things tricky. So I walked over to the sink and rinsed it out.
posted by Myself at 10:34 PM on October 24, 2007

Oh yes. I once dropped the 25 down a stairway while defragmenting the drive, just to prove a point. Defrag didn't miss a beat, and there were no bad or reallocated sectors afterward. But the aluminum nose of one stair tread was dented, and the homeowner yelled at me for that.

The touchscreen on the 72 apparently cracked when I was putting the machine into my padded Targus laptop backpack and let go of it a few inches up, rather than guiding it all the way down. It's a big wuss but it's a wuss with an assload of RAM (compared to other affordable used Toughbooks, anyway), so I stick with it.

The 34 is my baby, by the way. The smaller keyboard is actually easier to type on (and this, coming from a guy whose hand spans from A to Enter on a regular keyboard), and the rear strap handle makes it easy to palm the machine, Yorick's-skull-style, while typing on it with the other hand. There's a surprising amount of room inside the case, where I've added all sorts of solder-and-heatshrink abominations, soon to be documented on the Toughbook wiki.

I'm currently working on fixing a 28 for a friend, who managed to break the latch on a FPC flex cable connector while installing a backlit keyboard. The case and overall design of the machine are incredibly serious, and I have no doubt that it would survive an hour in a clothes dryer while pulverizing lesser laptops. But some components, while perfectly adequate for the stresses they may encounter from external abuse, are susceptible to damage by overeager and underexperienced modders. Be that as it may, I think my next machine may be a 28, unless an 18 lands in my lap first. Mmmm, tablet...
posted by Myself at 12:03 AM on October 25, 2007

Get something rugged.
posted by pracowity at 12:32 AM on October 25, 2007

A friend sent me this vid of a guy flipping out at his laptop. Too funny. "Am I going to jail cause I got a presentation in 10 minutes?" I wasn't quite this nuts but I did lose it for a few seconds.
posted by zaebiz at 1:07 AM on October 25, 2007 [1 favorite]

Anecdotally, I seem to remember Toughbooks are the default 'ruggedized' laptops issued to US and British troops in the field... Ah yes, here it is.
posted by Happy Dave at 1:29 AM on October 25, 2007

Look, there's no laptop that can take a beating. Even if you bought a 2500+ dollar toughbook you would be able to break it with a punch very, very easily. i have some experience with toughbooks and they're great for outdoors and the occasional 2 foot drop, but theyre not going to be able to handle someone with a violent temper. Nor will panasonic warranty cover you smashing it to bits.

You can either learn to control your temper or just buy 200-300 dollar beater laptops and go through a few a year.
posted by damn dirty ape at 7:31 AM on October 25, 2007

or get an accidental damage warranty.
posted by heeeraldo at 9:19 AM on October 25, 2007