Laptop on corrugated roads of the outback

Doug Roberts posted on the 24 September 2002 the tittle "laptop for dusty vehicle" this followup in the Thread QID=1601 which started 28 July 2002 - Original thread by Willie +
See below my message what Doug posted - I thought I continue the thread by conncentrating on the word vibrations rather than dust. Just like you said Doug, Willie point of view is the dust. My point of view "the dust has nothing to do with anything, the reall problem are the VIBRATIONS". As you said Doug:" it is very easy to insulate a laptop from the dust" but in my practical opinion IMPOSSIBLE to insulate TOTALLY the laptop HDD from serious virbrations, even if the computer is NOT turned ON. Doug your FIRST real life test) you're going to do the test with you computer switch ON in your car, dowmloading GPS points/or plotting your path. I am totally convinced that your HDD (hard disk drive) turned ON will NOT resist more than 3 hours on heavy corrugations. After 3 hours your HDD will have serious problems. You may loose the MBR. In your SECOND real life test) WITHOUT TURNING ON your computer during your travel, just carrying your laptop in a well padded case, I believe after 10000km of a mixture of corragated and bitumen roads your HDD will have also some problems. I have done the second test and will do the first test in 2003, that's why I am interested by your first test. In the second test my HDD experienced problems 1 month after return because I accessed files that I did NOT accessed during my trip. It showed up bad cluster later for that reason. I have to say David has posted some excellent material on the 23 July 2002 thread. With David posting, I have been able to "partly" CLONE my HDD. I suggest you do the same. Ask David how he did it? Doug please let us know of your results a few days after your return. Guy


""So we have 2 extreme opinions: one from Willie who blames the vibration or dust for a belated hard drive fail, and one from David which is much more encouraging. This is all useful to me as I'm about to obtain & install a laptop for mapping purposes, internfaced to a GPS so I'll want to be able to see it from the driver's seat. (Series 80 Cruiser). I am also in Computers and a reasonably mounted and dust protected 2nd hand lappie seems to be the way to go. Probably 2nd hand. I agree with David that a spare harddrive for backup would be a cheap failover solution; I'm also intrigued with the idea suggested in this forum of using a flash drive but I think large capacity ones would have to be expensive? Access to the Internet would seem to be essential these days but how do you do that without incurring heavy mobile charges (if you have a signal even). I'm new to ExplorOz, I hope I've posted this in the right place. Doug ""