As a Toughbook owner since the Pentium-90 days, they're a mixed bag. Everything you hear about them is true. I've shot up some old ones to see what calibers they'll withstand (.22 and birdshot, not much else), and I've used them in the rain, dropped them down stairs, launched rockets off one when I forgot the pad and didn't want to make another trip back home...

...but what you don't hear is all the annoying stuff. At least the old ones had super lame BIOS functionality, perhaps intended for a corporate environment where allowing the user to boot from USB (and this reinstall their OS) was actually a bad thing. The keyboards range from "mediocre" to "godawful". They're at least a generation behind in pretty much everything, and about 4 generations behind in max RAM capacity, for some reason. Since RAM tends to bottleneck my usage long before CPU, that means they become irrelevant a lot sooner than a Thinkpad with the same CPU, for instance.

And of course, the metal shell means that RF is tricky. They do all sorts of tricks to get the wifi signal out, with antennas inside plastic pods on the sides and stuff, but it's always a game of compromises.

Know that going in, and you can be very happy with a used Toughbook. I would have to be spending someone else's money to buy a new one.

Heh, conveniently the field work is generally funded with someone else’s money :D

Thanks for the heads up! I’m not sure what we’ll settle on exactly yet, but it’s not going to be my personal laptop that I’m bringing out into farmers’ fields this year!