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Ian
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PostPosted: Fri Apr 17, 2015 10:16 pm    Post subject: Rugged Laptops Reply with quote

Looking at buying a Toughbook CF-52. Anyone have any experience with these things or other rugged style laptops?
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obus Premium Member
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PostPosted: Sat Apr 18, 2015 7:35 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I have a tough book CF-C2. dropped it down my wooden stair case (about 13 steps). held up and works like a charm still.
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Last edited by obus on Mon Apr 20, 2015 2:16 pm; edited 1 time in total
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bugger101
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PostPosted: Sat Apr 18, 2015 8:45 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

i have one for work dropped it about 1000 times still works, only time i broke one was when it was raining and i left it on the tailgate Embarassed
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PostPosted: Sun Apr 19, 2015 9:45 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

i had a dell latitude d830 for almost 8 years, it got dropped so many times, it's been all around the world a few times, i finally manage to kill it, accidentally i might add, it seems it didn't much like lemonade Sad
with a puff of smoke it was dead.

every picture i've ever taken of my 11 month old son was on that hard drive Sad
i hope they can be recovered
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windfish
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PostPosted: Mon Apr 20, 2015 10:30 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Looks like the Toughbook CF-52 was released in 2007 (cNet review)

That means it's an 8 year old laptop... that was specifically bought to be abused.
Just be aware that after 8 years things have started to wear out, especially the hard drive if it's never been replaced. Battery will be completely shot if it hasn't been replaced recently.
What are you going to use it for?

I abused the mess out of my IBM Thinkpad T42 while at university; it lasted me 5 years before I replaced it, and I only replaced it 'cause at that point I wanted something faster (and I didn't need the mobility of a laptop anymore).
It only went in for warranty work once, after I rode my bike down a long set of stairs with it in my backpack.

Friend of mine took her Thinkpad (T...60 series? it was a Core2) to Guatemala when she did 2.5 years with Peace Corps. It came back battered and abused, but it lasted her the trip.

Again, depends what your use case is.
The low-end new laptops are cheap enough to almost be disposable (saw $150 Chromebooks the other day), just back up your data (which you should do anyways).


rubbachicken - How long ago did that happen?
Could have just damaged the motherboard, hard drive may be alright.
This thing - (Newegg link) allows you to hook a bare hard drive to another computer's usb port, would let you to pull data off if the disk spins up.

Would highly recommend off-site backup companies like CrashPlan and Carbonite.
I started using one after a house fire 5 years ago... had local backups, but they went up with everything else.
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PostPosted: Mon Apr 20, 2015 3:17 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

i have the laptop here, it happened thursday i think, i took the hard drive out straight away, and have a new second hand laptop coming, i hope it'll plug in and be fine.
it's a 1tb hybrid drive, some solid state, the rest regular, my brother who is in IT said, that if the hard drive is toast, if i but the exact same thing again, and switch out the circuit board, it should be fine.
he's not been wrong with these things in a very long time, so i'm waiting, i have a cable coming just incase it won't fit in the new laptop.
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Zeen
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PostPosted: Mon Apr 20, 2015 9:11 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Toughbook is the gold standard for ruggedized laptops, and priced accordingly. Some of the expense is the packaging required to protect the spinning hard drive. Solid state drives are intrinsically quite rugged, so you may be able to get by with a well-built normal unit like Lenovo, with an SSD. Toughbooks also have moisture resistance you may not need.

You'll take a bit of a gamble, but if you don't break it right away, you can replace it with a new more powerful unit in a year or two and be money ahead.
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PostPosted: Tue Apr 21, 2015 6:11 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

my old dell shitfire and farted sparks 2 months ago when I shut it down.so now I got a referb dell latatude 830.sofar it works fine, cheep with warranty.but the darn thing has the keys moved upward and a sharp squared off chassie and it agravates my wrist/arm all to hell.might have to get out the die grinder and round over the dam thing. the speakes are also not positioned very well, it should have tiny flip up sound reflectors so you can hear the darn thing.all it takes is less than an inch of reflecting serface to direct the sound to the operator/viewing aera and it sounds oh so much better. as for durability I havent eat the shit out of it yet,but that may come as it chews up on my arm.
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PostPosted: Thu Apr 23, 2015 10:36 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

lemon jiuce killed my D830, i had it 8 maybe 9 years, today i got an E6520, with a lot of fecking about, i managed to get my old hard drive from the D830 to work in it, so i have all my old emails and passwords, i agree the sharp edges were never comfortable, this E6520 had a rubbery feel to the space around the track pad, and sharp corners on the leading edge.
it's so much nicer to be back on a PC rather than the macbook i was using, hateful nasty thing that is

mark tucker wrote:
my old dell shitfire and farted sparks 2 months ago when I shut it down.so now I got a referb dell latatude 830.sofar it works fine, cheep with warranty.but the darn thing has the keys moved upward and a sharp squared off chassie and it agravates my wrist/arm all to hell.might have to get out the die grinder and round over the dam thing. the speakes are also not positioned very well, it should have tiny flip up sound reflectors so you can hear the darn thing.all it takes is less than an inch of reflecting serface to direct the sound to the operator/viewing aera and it sounds oh so much better. as for durability I havent eat the shit out of it yet,but that may come as it chews up on my arm.

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Ian
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PostPosted: Sat Apr 25, 2015 6:07 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Thanks for the suggestions everyone. Just for others information, they do make Toughbooks with SSD's and they are not all 8 years old.
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