Sum n Substance:

Thumbs up: Excellent ballistic armor, tactile and backlit keyboard, vibrant screen, brilliant performance.

Thumbs down: Poor battery life, noisy fan.

THE WHIZ-KID SPEAKS: Thinking about a rugged notebook which can withstand Mother nature’s abusive ways, then its this one for sure. Where most of the companies nowadays sacrifice mere aesthetics in the name of ruggedness this one simply stands out. This one is perfect for the field worker both design and performance wise.

Razzle-Dazzle: When road warriors move around with the E6400 XFR with them, I can assure that they’d look their part. Its got the “you better don’t mess around with me” look right on its face. Its grayish black lid has XFR written on the side of the lid. Its got an extremely sturdy Ballistic Armor shell which could easily match upto the military standards and possibly even surpass it. the entire chassis is made up of  PR-481 and it also has Primoseal to protect the ports from water, DirectVue for screen protection and QuadCool to avoid any instances of overheating and al of this put together forms the Ballistic armor.

There is a rubber bumper on both sides to cushion it in case  the user drops it . Further to complete the macho look the zinc hinges are of  silver colour and the lid is kept in place when its shut with an aluminium latch.

This one measures  13.9 x 11.5 x 2.2 inches and weighs 9.0 pounds which means that it cant be shoved into the backpack. You ll need to carry it with the help of the handle in the front. Its got a 14.1 inch display with a resolution of  1280 x 800 pixels and is pleasantly bright and vibrant. It comes loaded with a light sensor which adjusts the screen and the keyboard according to the surrounding brightness which I found to be a bit hypersensitive and fortunately it could be disabled.

Coming to the keyboard… this one is a full sized keyboard and unlike the rest of the keyboard the keys have a nice smooth feel to it. And for all those who want to use it for typing in darkrooms the keyboard has backlighting in this one which can be automatically enabled and disabled. Below the keyboard is the touchpad is the 2.6 x 1.5-inch touchpad, which offers negligible friction and the buttons below it are covered with soft rubber but that doesn’t give it the mushy kind of a feel.

Inside Dope: The audio of this one was decent enough to be heard in a small room. There was some echo kind of an effect which surely was because of the bulky interiors. The VGA webcam was efficient enough during voice calls made through Skype with a bit of blurring while waving of hands. Otherwise the images were pretty much clear.

This meets the MIL-STD-810F which means that this one can be dropped from heights of  48 inches, withstand 5.8 inches of water blown at 70 miles per hour for 30 minutes; and operate in temperatures from -20 to 145 degrees Fahrenheit.

Its got a Nvidia Quadro NVS 160M graphics chip which is more than enough for the kind of graphics that you would want to use on a rugged laptop. Anyways this isn’t a gaming laptop.

The XFR was a bit noisy, like the fan was turning constantly. The system was pretty much cool at about 90 degree Fahrenheit. Powered with a 2.66-GHz Intel Core 2 Duo P9600 processor and 4GB of RAM this one did pretty well in our overall system test surpassing the category average scores. It took around 65 seconds to boot the Windows Vista business version.

The unit comes loaded with Bluetooth 2.1 to easily connect peripherals like the keyboard and the mouse.  Video streaming from Hulu was also pretty smooth enough with hardly any stuttering.

Going to the ruggedness of the XFR… we dropped it from a height of 4 feet for almost ten times. Still the XFR hardly faced any problems hitting back into action. Even with splashed with 8-ounce of water, the water just slided down and the XFR continued to function normally. When under steady drizzle, the machine still continued to function properly but the droplets on the screen were a bit distracting.

I surely expected more in terms of battery life when it comes to laptops which are going to be away from the power outlets most of the time. This one lasted for 3 hours and 8 minutes on our battery tests which is quite less for this category. However a 12 cell battery can be added but that would cost you $449 extra.

Nitty- Gritty: This one surely the best in the category of rugged laptops and would be better if the battery life could be extended somehow. Anyways if your looking out for a durable laptop for tough outdoor use then is definitely the one.

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