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While it might be great for bragging rights to have a hardened, shockproof, stop-a-bullet, rock-em-sock-em laptop computer for daily use, there's a price tag attached to such niceties. Laptop computers that have to endure in patrol cars may need that extra hardiness, but the law enforcement executive, the detective, and even the school resource officer may be able to get by with something a bit less hardy (and a bit less expensive).
For you, there is the Toughbook CF-73 from Panasonic. This laptop hits the middle ground between a computer that you can use for a wheel chock and one that faints at the hint of moisture or vibration.
The CF-73 is up to running just about any application you throw at it with a 1.6 GHz Pentium 4 processor and either 256 or 512MB of RAM, expandable to 1GB. One of the tougher and more processorintensive computer tasks is, ironically, running full-motion video, such as that from a DVD. The sample provided for evaluation was used for a time in a department that was also...