can anyone here say with some experiance or certainty that laptops are not meant to be placed on their sides for travelling or not meant to take bumps on a potholed road? I heard that the new quinhai railway that china built form central china to lhasa tibet traverses the highest point for a railway in the world and that at that altitude ( 15,000 ft ) that laptops liquid ? ( something ) will burst as one example.
I never heard of what you speak, i.e. laptops going liquid. I have one that was meant to be a portable server and weighs 13 lbs. and it's robust but I wouldn't want to abuse it anymore than I'd abuse any tool that was necessary to do my job.
I was an IM/IT Specialist working in Navy Medicine and do know that the Army and Navy field medics use laptops to connect via satellite cards to get field assist with physicians on some casualties in order to stabilize them better for transport to a field hospital. I also know military medicine is working toward using this capability deeper and the laptops need to be tough and endure lots of rough handling or they would be useless when needed.
These are obviously not an off the shelf item but it goes to show that we can achieve certain things if needed. My current laptop is an Alienware M17x and it is built like a tank and the conventional hdd has a free fall sensing device that speaks with the BIOS and will park the heads should it get the idea it's falling, of course I would rather not test that function and use an SSD as my main drive and the conventional for programs and storage.
The weakest part in a laptop is probably the spinning disk. Modern disks can withstand a certain amount of bumping because their heads automatically retract, but if you want a really bump hardened laptop, you should install an SSD.
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