Rugged Laptop Advice????

[Lord Blackadder]

I am an archaeologist, which means every summer I take tens of thousands of dollars' worth of expensive electronics equipment out into the field and beat the hell out of them.

I'm currently looking to find a replacement to my current field computer, which is an incredibly sturdy but now very old Panasonic Toughbook (CF-27, lovely magnesium chassis but it's a Pentium III for goodness' sake).

I need something that is a genuine rugged laptop (everything labelled "semi-rugged" is out) that can run ArcGIS 10.2. That's going to require a decently powerful i5 CPU and a minimum of 8GB memory.

In the past I've always used Panasonic Toughbooks, but I've been looking at the latest rugged efforts from Getac and Dell and they look comparable. Budget is about $3000.

Any recommendations/experiences? (please don't turn this into a discussion about Apples - they don't make rugged laptops and there's nothing I can do about that, however much I'd love to see one)

 

[2298754]

I was thinking tough book when I read the thread title.

How about Lenovo?

 

[impulse462]

Yeah lenovo has those laptops with "roll cages" kind of like an endoskeleton for the computer. also the harddrive has shock absorbers as well as a sensor that locks the drive if it detects that it's falling.

 

[Lord Blackadder]

Thanks for the tips. The Lenovos look to have some ruggedness built in, but not quite to the standard the Toughbook has set.

 

[Samuelsan2001]

Toughbook CF 53

Looks your best bet, a company called Captec does good looking rugged laptops too but you'll need to cantact them for a quote.