Can Your Notebook Survive A Good Trashing?

[Dashken]

You have read about all those cool protection technologies packed into your notebook, but have you ever seen them in action? Join Masaki Kobayashi of Lenovo's Yamato Labs as he drops a notebook and pours water on another!

Yes, you read that right. He dropped a notebook and poured water over another notebook. Don't worry. We have the videos to prove it. Now, if we can only convince him to shoot a bullet into the notebook....

Here's a quote from the article :-

"As ThinkPads have always designed for use by businesses, they have to be really, really rugged to withstand daily abuses at the hands of careless, uncaring and/or disgruntled employees. The protection of data stored within each notebook is also a critical issue for Lenovo, as any data lost or stolen can wreak havoc on any business."

Link : Can Your Notebook Survive A Good Trashing?

[Destruk]

I wish you would have gotten better videos for this. I watched the whole 'drop test' video and you didn't get any footage of him actually dropping the laptop? And I think his presentation for the "Spill test" could have been a lot better if he had poured the water on the keyboard with the laptop "ON" - DUH... but no, we didn't even see the thing boot up after having water spilled onto it.

How hard would it be for someone to encase the laptop in plastic - with simple connections to a battery, to make it waterproof to 100 meters like a sports watch? Apparently it is quite difficult - or this wouldn't have even gotten a mention. The drop test is more concerned about a hard drive than it is about the lcd display.

Thanks anyway.

[Adrian Wong]

Originally Posted by Destruk

I wish you would have gotten better videos for this. I watched the whole 'drop test' video and you didn't get any footage of him actually dropping the laptop? And I think his presentation for the "Spill test" could have been a lot better if he had poured the water on the keyboard with the laptop "ON" - DUH... but no, we didn't even see the thing boot up after having water spilled onto it.

How hard would it be for someone to encase the laptop in plastic - with simple connections to a battery, to make it waterproof to 100 meters like a sports watch? Apparently it is quite difficult - or this wouldn't have even gotten a mention. The drop test is more concerned about a hard drive than it is about the lcd display.

Thanks anyway.

Nope, we missed that shot because he suddenly dropped it without warning us. We all got a shock. He didn't repeat the test for the video because he actually thought the notebook was a goner. But when we checked later, it was still in running condition.

Yeah, the spill test would have been a lot cooler had he tested it on a running notebook. But he wanted to show us how the spilled water flow from the keyboard into the holes and out the bottom. That's why the notebook was in a disassembled condition.

Hmm.. I don't think that would be easy at all. It's one thing to make it rain-proof, it's quite another thing to keep the chassis watertight under pressure. A depth of 10m would be hard enough. 100m would be quite impossible. A watch is such a small device. Making larger devices survive a depth of 100m would be exponentially more difficult.