By Rich Malloy
July 2006

When your laptop crashes to the floor, the first thing likely to flash through your mind is a vision of the wallet-wounding repair bill. Next up: all that data you just lost.

Laptops lead risky lives, fraught with potential peril compared with the sedentary ones of desktops. After all, desktops don't fear falling to the floor—most are already resting there—and few worry about having coffee sloshed on them or being left out in the rain. Nor do they dread summertime stints in the back seat of an overheated car or freezing in the trunk during winter. For laptops, however, these punishments are real possibilities.

People who work in harsh environments can enlist special ruggedized notebooks from Durabook, Itronix, and Panasonic (see "Tougher Stuff"), but for everyday use in an office or a hotel room, these well-padded, pricey models are overkill. A better bet is a mainstream notebook that's not only fast and affordable but also reasonably sturdy.

We investigated the durability of mainstream notebooks by forgoing our standard benchmark tests and substituting a gauntlet of durability tests designed to simulate typical laptop mishaps. We froze the notebooks, sprayed them with water, baked them, and then dropped them from the height of a typical desk. (See "Rating Rugged: How We Tested" for the details.)

We notified the major notebook manufacturers of our torture tests and asked them to submit one of their latest thin-and-light notebooks. Four courageous companies stepped forth: Dell sent us its Latitude D620, Gateway its NX560X, Hewlett-Packard its Compaq NC6420, and Toshiba its Tecra M5-S433.

All four notebooks demonstrated power and the ability to take punishment. Inside their magnesium-alloy chassis were Intel Core Duo dual-core processors running at speeds from 1.66GHz to 2GHz. And, unlike their tank-tough ruggedized cousins, these models were feature-laden, with three of the four outfitted with large wide-screen displays.

Tough Guys
Keep in mind that this type of testing does not yield scientific results. With a sample size of a single notebook from each manufacturer, we can't draw solid statistical inferences from our data.

Nonetheless, we were duly impressed with all the notebooks. Not so long ago, a similar array of tests would have taken half these laptops out of action early on. These tough guys, however, brushed off our initial tests with little or no breakage. So, to push the notebooks to the limit, we added a second drop test, increasing the difficulty to what we called "MIL-SPEC-Lite": a 36-inch drop onto plywood over concrete (a plunge none of the vendors expected the notebooks to survive). That, at last, produced some damage.

Naming an overall winner is difficult. The Gateway NX560X is clearly the bargain of the pack, with its low price and roomy 15.4-inch display. The Dell Latitude D620 offers the richest assortment of features. The notebooks from HP and Toshiba, however, are not far behind, with their own respective checklists of goodies.

Durability, too, was fairly equal until we completed our last test, the 36-inch drop. When the dust settled, Toshiba's laptop was the only one still fully operational (or at least the closest to being so), making it our durability champ. Note, however, that all our contenders continued to boot up, and the data on their hard drives remained intact. That's something we would not have seen just a few years ago.

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