If you’ve ever dropped your notebook computer, raise your hand! (Yikes, not while you still have a grip on your computer!) If employers ever found out just how hard I can be on their equipment, they’d never hire me. Of course, there’s always the off-chance that I could get a job in the Dell testing labs, where I could be put in charge of seeing just how sturdy its new line of Latitude “Road Warrior” machines are.

The ATG D630, in particular, garnered Popular Science’s attention. (In fact, the video they have on this is rather hilarious, if you like to see machines flop to the floor and keep on running…)

This rugged notebook runs from $2,000 to $3,000 depending on just how durable you need your machine. But the standard features include these: And Intel Core 2 Duo T7100 processor, Windows XP Home Edition, a 14.1-inch screen, a feeble 512MB of memory, an 80GB of storage, a RW/DVD drive and an 802.11g wireless card. The cost goes up as you add a shock-mounted hard drive, more memory and a fingerprint reader for security.

But you know what? All that sturdiness adds pounds. The starting weight for the ATG D630 is a whopping 6.3 pounds. And that would simply force me to heave my equipment around in ways that are bound to hurt it. Tomorrow, I’ll share my dream Dell machine with you — which takes a different approach to durability.

Posted on November 20th, 2007 by dian