Autonerdz forums

Dan I went with ToughBooks. I own 4 of them right now and may get a 5th. The reason is they hold up in the environment you are concerned with. They have screens that are viewable outdoors and can take a fall as well as getting wet. Batteries and hard drives are swapable as well. Screens are square and I am fine with that. These are meant to go on the road with me be it a road test or track. If I wish to view bigger I email the capture and view it at home, work or wherever I wish.

Just my take on it.

Spence

Dan,

I have been buying refurbished Dell Latitude laptops. They are the business grade Dell's, so there are tons of them out there refurbished, and if you get them at the right time they are less than $200. I get them from the Dell Refurbished website.

With that said, they are obviously not as tough as a Toughbook, but I'm pretty careful with them. If you're the one paying for them that's how it goes.

The other thing is that the screens are not that good outdoors, they have glare if you're in the direct sun, but usually if I'm outside with one it's inside a car anyway, so I can't say that's been a big deal.

Overall, they are very good for how much I get them for

Hello Dan, you don't necessarily need a toughbook. We have more than 8 laptops in this shop that have been used daily for years and none of them are toughbooks. They are just "middle of the road" laptops or cheaper.

They are not going dead from dust, so unless you are in an extreme dusty place, don't worry about it. Dropping a laptop would be very rare. Between 4 techs, a service writer, and the owner, no one is dropping laptops and killing them. That would be like a once in a decade accident, so not something to be over concerned with. Also, no problems with fluids getting into them. Why would someone use a laptop during a leak repair? Laptops are used for diagnosis and looking up info. There isn't fluids spraying everywhere all over the shop that you need to worry about.

The next question is about SSD vs. HDD. This is going to be personal preference for how much money you want to spend. The difference between them is the speed at which the laptop starts up, and the speed at which programs load. So, like when you are first starting picoscope up, that has to be fetched from the HDD(or SSD) on first start up and put into the RAM memory to run the program, but once it is up and running it doesn't matter, the speed is the same. Also, the difference in speed isn't significant. So, if you want to spend much more, then get the faster SSD, or save money and get the HDD which is just slightly slower.

I think you should be more concerned with the rating of the CPU, and the amount of RAM. More RAM is better, but again, it's all in how much you want to spend. Something with 8GB of RAM or more is good. When shopping laptops, look up the CPU rating here:  https://www.cpubenchmark.net/CPU_mega_page.html

Hope that helps 

We like the lenovo's for reliability.  Not rough and tough but you could break two or three of them for the cost of a Rugged one.

Look for something with Windows 7 or higher, 2 GHz duo core or better processor and 8 gigs of RAM.  Preferably USB 3.0 for a 4425 but 2.0 is fine.

While on the subject of hard drives. Another reason I went ToughBook was you can sway the hard drives in less then 30 seconds. Instead of buying another computer I bought another hard drive. I did this when you couldn't have software from two different OE's on the same hard drive. Partitioning seemed the way but was proved not to work without issue. At that point I would load the software separate and swap the drive when I needed to vs buying another computer.

Next about a decade ago or so I had a brand of OE software on a laptop before a had a rugged design. It fell off a fender of a vehicle and render it useless. When I go a new laptop I called the OE and explained what happened to get the software replaced. They wouldn't have any parts of it. Kinda figured they wouldn't trust anyone but I gave it a shot. Had to buy the software again. This is one reason I headed ToughBook as well as SSD.

Batteries swap just as fast as I can not or don't wish to run any style charger including 12 volt cigarette port power. Having a spare battery and swapping works for me.

Tom Roberts wrote on Feb 11^th, 2019 at 2:04pm:


I have a Lenovo Yoga at home and love it. I've been looking at getting a Lenovo Flex or a Think Pad.

Was put in contact with a guy on FaceBook who builds Lenovo ThinkPad business class laptops. For about $800 I can get myself a laptop with everything I need, plus he installs multiboot with pretty much EVERY OEM software like the IDS, GM tech2 and MDI, along with all the Japanese and Euro. I just have to pay for the access. Wondering if that is worth it?

My wife recently got a Lenovo IdeaPad 330, almost exactly this: https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/ideapad/ideapad-300-series/Ideapad-330-17-G...

It came with Windows 10 home, and 500GB HDD.
We paid an extra $50, and upgraded to Windows 10 Pro, and 256GB SSD.

For what she needs it for, it has more than enough power.
10,000+ songs, pics, and videos, and still over 210GB available.