BoatBanter.com - Boat Computer?

Capt. JG wrote:
"Sjouke Burry" wrote in message
...
hpeer wrote:
wrote:
On Fri, 13 Mar 2009 08:26:53 -0400, Wayne.B
wrote:

On Fri, 13 Mar 2009 05:32:10 +0000, Larry wrote:

I needed....well, not quite true....WANTED a new laptop. The 17"
monsters eat batteries, are heavy and cumbersome, too much. So, I
started researching netbooks.
In my experience the two most important qualities on a boat computer
are screen brightness and durability. The Panasonic "Toughbook"
models do well on both counts. They are designed for use in the
outdoor environment. I picked up a used CF-48 two years ago for about
$300 and it now has 5,000+ nautical miles on it, all of that spent
exposed to the elements on the flybridge. It has survived numerous
salt spray incidents, one 3 foot drop and a lot of slamming around.
Amen. I bought a used toughbook CF-29 for cheap a few years ago. Came
out of a police vehicle, so I'm sure it's had coffee spilled on it
many times. The battery was no good, but I just removed it, and the
thing runs just fine on 12 volts from the boat. It has enough intenal
regulation that it isn't affected by transient overvoltages. Unlike
"normal" laptops, this one is designed for viewing in direct daylight.

My desktop died so I bought a laptop as a replacement. I got a Dell as I
have them at work and have very good luck. They gave me the option of a
128Gb SOLID STATE hard drive for $350 extra. I opted for that as, in my
experience, the thing that goes first is usually the hard drive.

Also should make the machine light, cooler, faster and less power hungry.
And a broken disk much earlier, flash memory has a limited number
of write cycles.......

While true, it's between 1 and 5 million cycles these days. That's many
years. Normal harddisks aren't immune from failure by any stretch. I'd say
the tradeoff is you get a much more stable system with fewer moving parts
with flash memory.

Frankly I had not know of or considered the read/write issue as I didn't
even know SSHD's were a viable option until confronted with one on the
selection chart. That the price was soooooooooo low, $400.

Knowing what I do now I'm not 100% sure I would do it again however I
have had all kinds of bad luck with mechanical drives. I have had one
or two failures in a laptop. Another time I had a screw come loose in
the bay and when our IT department called me to get the serial number I
turned it over and the screw ran across the circuit board. Instant
failure.

In fact the reason I got a laptop was because the OS drive on my desktop
had failed. Luckily I kept all my data on a secondary "data" drive
which I back up.

As in boats, all things are tradeoffs and compromises. I will have to
live with this one - for good or ill.