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Mr. Luddite Mr. Luddite is offline
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First recorded activity by BoatBanter: Aug 2013
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Default Laptop recommendations

On 3/29/2017 2:09 PM, wrote:
On Wed, 29 Mar 2017 08:04:36 -0400, "Mr. Luddite"
wrote:

I'd consider a Dell if I could find one designed for commercial use.
Seems to be many of them around that are still chugging away.


===

I have an old Dell laptop that lives on the boat, usually at the lower
helm. It gets used mostly for displaying weather information and as a
comm terminal for the SSB radio, but it can double as a navigation
display/chartplotter if necessary. What's not to like? It has always
been flaky and temperature sensitive, requiring periodic reboots to
restore it to operation.



Tough environment for a computer, I'm sure.

We used to buy computers to run the systems we built in my business but
I've forgotten what they were. They were used for graphical displays,
some computational purposes and storage of various process programs in a
spreadsheet. The actual connection to the system was via an industrial
programmable logic controller (PLC) that served as the input/output
device as well as the actual control and interlock logic.
We liked Allen Bradley for this.

The computers were "industrial" rated, but I am not sure what that meant
other than they were supposed to be physically "rugged".