BusinessWeek published an article about increased reliability of semi-rugged laptops and how the Panasonic Toughbook series is proving itself in Iraq.

Toughbooks have been around for a long time, but they rarely get this kind of press in mainstream publications. Usually I read about them in industry automation and manufacturing IT publications. This BusinessWeek article has a number of really interesting statistics in it that make a good case for considering a ruggedized laptop. Here are the one year "casualty rates" for standard laptops:

• 20 percent fail overall,
• 35 percent fail if a laptop frequently leaves its docking station,
• 50 percent fail if a laptop is frequently used outdoors or on shop floors, while
• only 5 percent of rugged or semi-rugged machines fail.

A good example of a semi-rugged laptop that's reasonably priced and pretty available is the Panasonic Toughbook 48: magnesium alloy case, 40-Gigabyte shock-mounted removable hard drive, Intel Centrino CPU at 1.5 or 1.4 Gigahertz.

I realize this is kind of the polar opposite of the laptop I've been wishing for (an Apple PowerBook 15-inch laptop), but I can definitely see myself using a Toughbook and liking the image that would create in the minds of people who see me using it. I'd have more peace-of-mind with a Toughbook than I would with other laptops. I think every laptop users' fear is a dead machine when you take your laptop out of your bag-- I'm no different.

As for the suggestion in the BusinessWeek article that the Toughbook 72 can stop a bullet, I wouldn't want to test that if I could avoid it.

On the other hand, I think that a number of late model laptops might stand a chance of stopping a bullet. Two people have stopped what they were doing in the last week and gasped at my Dell Inspiron 7500 because it's so big and heavy. I bet those people think my laptop could stop a bullet. I know better. [ via Boing Boing ]