Thinkpads Forum

I understand that Lenovo has recently gone to the trouble of testing and
making military grades to several of their laptops- including the X200(s).
Indeed on some of their claims they say their laptops reach more military specs
than some Toughbooks. Anyone know how Lenovo's "magnesium rollcage" compares
with whatever Panasonic uses with their Magnesium toughbooks?

It looks like Lenovo might finally be in the same league durability wise. I mean its
not like the thin toughbooks are really that durable....?

Here's the Lenovo talk...
http://www.lenovo.com/news/us/en/2009/0 ... uting.html

Thanks, JL

Hmm. To me these notebooks cater to entirely different markets. A colleague has an X40 and that's a laptop you can actually use day to day. In particular the keyboard is basically as good as the larger IBM/Lenovo laptop keyboards. We have also sold Panasonic CF-18 Toughbooks to customers, who use them as a tablet. This is just as well, because the keyboard on the CF-18 is close to unusable. Beside the overall smaller size of the keys, the cursor keys are not arranged in the inverted T shape, which I find unforgivable. On the other hand this particular Toughbook has all magnesium alloy on the outside. We're not merely talking about an internal rollcage here, but a solid metal enclosure and the heft that comes with it. There is no flex when you press on it. I would say it's more solid than even the new unibody aluminium Macbook, which does exhibit some flex in the display lid. The CF-18 is also splash-proof. All ports are covered with plastic or rubber flaps.

As to durability in a non-hostile environment, I would vote for the Lenovo, albeit this is based purely on my personal and hence anecdotal experience. I am writing this on an almost 6 year old IBM T30, which I have used daily at work and at home. It's had the usual fault with the front memory slot as well as a fan failure, but those were both fixed relatively easily by myself. By contrast I also owned a Panasonic CF-62 years ago. This was before they invented the term "Toughbook", but it had some of the same features, such as a completely rigid mag-alloy display lid and gel-mounted hard drive. That machine was a wreck after only 3 years. The keyboard had started falling apart, the power socket had an intermittent fault, the plastic screen bezel had cracked in multiple places and, finally, the CPU / memory subsystem developed a nasty intermittent fault. That machine also had some of the noisiest cooling fans and a proprietary, non-exchangable CD-Writer drive, which had also become quite unreliable after 3 years.

P.S.: I wrote the above before finally skimming through the link you provided. Not sure what to think of it. Perhaps it confirms that the fancy metal enclosures of the Panasonics aren't really a necessity? Then certainly, if my experience is anything to go by, IBM/Lenovo are better at everything else anyway, so it's no surprise they passed the test. More to the point, I think IBM/Lenovo engineers are addressing real problems, whereas the renowned Panasonic "toughness" is more of a marketing stunt. Two examples:

(1) The Panasonic gel-mounted hard drive consists of hard gel/rubber brackets instead of screwing the drive in. Compare this with the velocity sensor, first introduced by IBM, that parks the hard disk heads when the laptop falls. Tell me which solution you think is more effective? Compare it even to the rubberised air cushion at the bottom of the earlier T30 that breaks the fall when you set the laptop down on a table.

(2) Keyboards. These can make or break a laptop. Arguably no one pays more attention to those than IBM/Lenovo. I just read Lenovo have been working on a special rubberised paint for their latest laptops for better feel and durability. Certainly after 6 years of use all keys on my T30 are still working, none of them are loose and the legend has only rubbed off a little on a few keys. By contrast after 3 years use of my Panasonic, keys had started coming loose, falling off and the legend had rubbed off completely on several of them.

Fragrant,

Thanks for the very experienced and informative post. Sounds like your pretty well versed
in both these products lines right down to the construction methods.

Actually I wasn't even trying to compare the bigger toughbooks you mentioned, though maybe its best you compared them anyway. I had meant the thin-toughbooks like the T-7/8 and W 7/8 series. Panasonic says (according to the Dynamism web-site)...
"the Panasonic W8 is durable as well. It withstood 100kg (220 pounds) of weight, as well as a 30cm (11.8 inch) drop, in Panasonic's lab tests."
So it sounds like those machines might to over-built with regard to being bale to have someone step on them, but maybe not so great to drop onto concrete. Interesting comparison. J