Evaluation of Two Fully Rugged Laptop Computers for the Forest Service, Page04

Evaluation of Two Fully Rugged Laptop Computers for the Forest Service

Questionnaire

A questionnaire was sent to 20 law enforcement officers who were field testing a new software system (Law Enforcement and Investigations Management and Attainment Reporting System also called LEIMARS). Ten officers tested the LEIMARS system on the CF-30 laptop while the other 10 used the XR-1 laptop. Respondents provided feedback on how well the laptop performed during everyday operations and gave their impressions about certain features, including: the user interface (screen display, touchscreen, touchpad, keyboard), hardware features (battery life, USB ports, CD/DVD drive, biometrics), use of the laptops in vehicle mounts and office docks, and general impressions of how well the laptop performed. The respondents also were asked how easy the laptop was to use and how well it met their needs.

Overall, the CF-30 laptop rated slightly higher than the XR-1 , although all results were within error margins because of the small sample size (table 1). The CF-30 laptop ranked higher for its user interface, hardware features, and users' general impressions.

Table 1—A comparison of mean scores for laptop user interface; hardware, vehicle and office mounting capabilities; and general features. The scale is from 1 to 5, where 1 is a strongly negative evaluation and 5 is a strongly positive evaluation.
	Mean	Std. Dev.	N	Mean	Std. Dev.	N	Sig.
	Panasonic CF-30			General Dynamics XR-1
Interface	3.6	0.46	7	2.9	1.31	8	0.210
Hardware	3.4	0.47	5	2.5	1.08	9	0.102
Mount	1.9	1.00	6	2.2	1.49	9	0.714
General impressions	3.8	0.59	7	3.1	1.21	9	0.167

The CF-30 laptop also ranked higher on ease of use and how well it met users' needs (table 2).

Table 2—A comparison of how well respondents felt the laptop met their
needs and how easy it was to use, based on a scale of 1 to 10.
	Mean	Std. Dev.	N	Mean	Std. Dev.	N	Sig.
	Panasonic CF-30			General Dynamics XR-1
How well did the laptop meet your needs?	8.7	1.20	6	6.87	1.81	9	0.058
How easy was the laptop to use?	8.3	0.82	6	6.88	1.73	8	0.820