Safety cushion hardens hard drives in a fall
Product: IBM Thinkpads with Active Protection System Price: ThinkPad R50 HK$13,288+, ThinkPad T41 HK$16,888+ Pros: You can safely sling your laptop with confidence Cons: Nothing significant
Anyone who has ever owned a laptop has dropped it. Which is why most notebooks are put through fairly rigorous drop tests before they are allowed on to the market.
While the laptop displays of a decade ago would instantly shatter at the slightest bump, today's screens can take a surprising amount of punishment without so much as popping a pixel.
But the story is less true of hard drives. Despite various advances over the years, a hard drive is still the Achilles heel of any computer. Unfortunately, it is also the most valuable part.
So IBM has come up with what it claims is the world's first autonomic hard-drive protection system. The idea is based on car airbag technology.
The company's new ThinkPad R50 and T41 laptops come with Active Protection System, which features a chip that can detect when it is suddenly moved, such as when it is dropped. The chip then tells the motherboard to park the heads on the hard drive until it stops moving. Most damage to hard drives is caused by the drive heads being jarred against the disk.
Assuming your data was not scrambled in the crash, both laptops also offer one-button disaster recovery.
The ThinkPads are available with either 14- or 15-inch screens. The lightweight T41 comes with a 1.4GHz Intel Pentium M, 256 megabytes of ram, a 30-gigabyte hard drive, a CD-RW/DVD-ROM combo drive and 32MB ATI Mobility Radeon 7500. For networking it offers 802.11b wireless and Ethernet.
The chunkier R50 has a bigger hard drive, up to 2GB of ram, faster 802.11a, b and g wireless, and Gigabit Ethernet. It also has more ports and room for a second battery.
