Evaluation of Two Fully Rugged Laptop Computers for the Forest Service
Conclusions
The Forest Service Chief Information Office asked MTDC to evaluate two fully rugged laptop computers for the Forest Service's corporate system. The Panasonic Toughbook CF-30 and General Dynamics GoBook XR-1 were evaluated. Both laptops were subjected to a variety of environmental tests, including cold and hot extreme temperatures, moisture/rain, drop/shock, and vibration tests. The laptops also were subjected to performance testing for GPS accuracy, battery life, screen brightness and visibility, WLAN and WWAN throughput, and benchmarking scores. A questionnaire asked 20 law enforcement officers to evaluate the CF-30 and XR-1 laptops they used in the everyday operations and their impressions on certain features. Overall, the CF-30 laptop rated slightly higher, although the results are within statistical margins of error.
Finally, a process called Choosing by Advantages was used to determine which laptop rated higher based on the Forest Service's fully rugged computing requirements. Typical Forest Service users across several different resource areas were asked to rate (between 1 and 100) the importance of these attributes to their job function. These importance factors were multiplied by performance values of each attribute and added to yield a total score for each laptop. The CF-30 laptop rated higher (301) than the XR-1 laptop (274).
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