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Laptops for Slippery Laps

This is not a gadget blog, but I love a good gadget (though I love a good lo-tech solution even better), and when something comes onto my radar screen that interests me, I just might pop a notice here. The thing that's blipping this moment is a review in Forbes of two "ruggedized" notebooks, namely the Panasonic Toughbook 29 and the Itronix GoBook III: Laptops Built For Abuse - Forbes.com. Why do I care about these things? Two reasons. 1. My first notebook (her name was Husky), an Apple Titanium Powerbook, hit the bricks three times, first with a motherboard failure (still under extended warranty, thank God), next with a hard-drive "click-of-death" failure (I was able to recover almost everything on it, but had to painstackingly and nerverackingly back everything up via firewire and a host of software tools, and I had to buy a new drive and move it all back over), and finally met its demise when the display stopped playing nicely with the rest of the system. It now serves nicely as a movie-playing device and sits next to the television, but it's not a portable computer anymore. I could have it repaired and get a new display installed, but frankly that would probably cost as much as my new powerbook did. 2. The Itronix GoBook is made by a Spokane company. I live in Spokane. I know people who work at Itronix. That's pretty cool. (Totally geeky I know. But I'm geeky. Sue me.) Forbes gives the Panasonic the nod, but both models look solid. The thing that I wish was that it came in Apple flavors (maybe call it the iLikeitRough). I don't suppose I would buy one anyway, since I'm not so very rich, but the surprising thing to me has always been that notebooks are meant to be carted around, yet they seem so fragile. It's likely an affordability problem, but I bet a lot of people would be willing to spend a litttle extra cash for a little less fragile system. The new powerbooks, by the way, have hard drives that supposedly protect themselves when tipped, so that the drive itself doesn't crash and burn if you happen to drop it. It makes me wonder if this isn't going to be a growing market, depending on how many people have lost their laptops to slippery laps. What would you pay for a safer alternative? And in what format? Windows? Macintosh? Linux? TI-994A? Blessings.

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