Tough Notebook Challenge: Which Notebooks Take A Beating And Keep On Booting?

The desk drop test:
All four notebooks passed this test, where each unit slipped out of a pair of hands and dropped to the carpeted floor. The Panasonic, the Acer and the Toshiba all booted up right away. Dell passed the test, but took a long enough time to reboot that it could make a butter-fingered user very nervous. Still, all the competitors advanced to the next round.

The soda spill test:
The Dell and the Toshiba each failed this test. After the Dell notebook had four ounces of cola poured onto the keyboard, it shut down and then, on an attempted reboot, reported that it could not find the hard drive and shut down again. Another attempt to reboot the system yielded nothing. After cola was poured onto the Toshiba notebook, it remained powered on but froze up and could not be rebooted to a working state. The Acer and the Panasonic each passed and those two made it to the Death Round.

Slide Show: When the Cola Hits The Keyboard -- The Tough Notebook Challenge

The stairs drop test:
Both the Acer and Panasonic notebooks were placed securely into a padded Targus backpack-style notebook carrying case. One at a time, the engineer walked each notebook down three steps, and then dropped the bag and let it tumble down seven hard steps and onto a landing. Both the Acer and the Panasonic were pulled out of the bag and booted up as if nothing happened. None showed any signs of physical damage either, with the LCD, keyboard, case and -- in Acer's case -- slightly protruding battery showing any dents, dings or wear.

So, at the end of our first-ever Tough Notebook Challenge, we crowned Acer and Panasonic winners for their notebooks' ability to withstand typical disasters encountered by the mobile PC business user.

The systems and their specs:

Toshiba Tecra A9-S9017
Vista Business
Core 2 Duo 2.2 GHZ, 2 GB RAM
Graphics: NVIDIA Quadro NVS 130M
PassMark: 536.1

Acer TravelMate 4720
XP with SP2
Core 2 Duo 2 GHZ, 1 GB RAM
PassMark: 501

Dell Latitude D630
Vista Business
Core 2 Duo 2.2 GHZ, 2 GB RAM
Graphics: NVIDIA Quadro NVS 135 M
PassMark: 535.4

Panasonic Toughbook CF-Y5
Vista Business
Core 2 Duo 1.67 GHZ, 500 MB RAM
Graphics: Intel 945GM Express
PassMark: 334.6

Each of the four notebooks is shipped to market with an MSRP of less than $2,500.