Advice for a 10" - 12" rugged laptop with good performance?

E

evalon

New Member
Hello,

I'm looking for a 10" - 12" laptop to be used around the world even in non-electronics friendly surroundings.

It preferably should have these characteristics:

- A good screen with high resolution & a graphics card with dedicated RAM
- A long on-time for the batteries (6+ hours prefered)
- Low noise
- low weight
- not too expensive
- good overall performance
- more than 1 GB RAM (at least possible)
- can use HDD at ~1 TB
- it need not be the latest model but not older than 1-2 years.
- communication connections like firewire, USB, HDMI, external screen, infrared ...
- yet capable of sustaining some hard conditions in terms of vibrations and humidity.
- it must be a PC - a Mac will not do.

I'd appreciate any suggestions you may have ;)

Greetings,

Jesper
 
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if you dont need completely rugged, i recommend the business rugged T and W series, i own a T4 and even tho its quite outdated by most performance standards, it is still able to do word and such, which is more than enough for work environments, and gets around a 6-7 hour battery life. the battery in mine has been used for over 2700 hours so that goes to show these batteries can handle quite a few cycles without dropping off. recommend the panasonic toughbook line, but you will spend around 3-4k on one, but imho its worth every penny.

tho if you want to save on one, i just thought you could check ebay, there often is quite a few used toughbooks on the auction site.

-the harddrive option your looking for in the toughbooks i dont believe is avaliable...thats quite large by even regular laptop standards, id say you might be able to sneak in a 500 gig drive but anything more might be iffy, as their really using the space they have in the toughbooks, and their only 12.1 inch formfactors
 
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Hi both,

& thanks for your suggestions.

I've taken a look at the toughbooks (or Panasonic's "close to toughbooks"), and they look interesting. However, in general they are a bit heavier than I'd prefer, and also the screen resolution is relatively low (I will be also be using it for graphics from time to time). And then I forgot that I'd like it to have an optical combi drive - preferably with a Blu-ray capability. And I can't seem to find that ...?

What I do like is their ruggedness and also the usable battery on-time (often 7 hours). Would you have any other suggestions?

Thanks for considering,

Jesper
 
most of the business or ruggedized laptops arent built for leisure, they typically just have the bare bones to get the job done, so im fairly certain you wont have much luck finding something with a blu-ray drive in it or a decent gpu, generally if you want battery life you will have to settle on a intel gma or hd series, and honestly the 4500 in the cf-t8 is quite nice by integrated standards
 
Hi again,

Just a short note saying that I appreciate your feedback and need to fine-tune my requirements.

Thanks for replying ;)

Jesper

A P.S.: Is there any chance I can re-install the Windows software directly from an external harddisk so that I do not need the optical drive? Thanks for looking ;-) Jesper
 
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you can technically reinstall a disk image without using a cd, but that requires cloning the current installation via a cloner like norton ghost or acronis drive image.
 
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