I registered for a Dell Premier account and I can get a pretty good discount on anything they make. Does anyone have any experience with their rugged line, good or bad? Absolute musts or things to avoid? This would be for in a vehicle when I’m on vacation in Wyoming, scouting out some land we bought.

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We use them on military aircraft. Not something I'd buy for myself.

Why?

@BiggEZ

Extremely expensive for what you get.  
Want rugged?  Get a refurbished police laptop for 1/3 the cost and have a nearly unlimited supply of parts.

https://toughruggedlaptops.com/

Or

https://www.bobjohnson.com/toughbooks/

Are Dell Mobile Workstations any good? They have an aluminum/magnesium alloy body/case if I recall.

I really like my rugged 14!

I respect those for what they are but if I was going to buy a Panasonic I would probably just buy a new one. I tend to like Dell though for better or worse.

Massive overkill unless you need to use it in the rain or have it survive being dropped into a stream or something.

My mobile workstation (old M4600 IIRC) took a tumble down about 5 or 6 steps (while off or hibernating) and it worked fine afterwards. Now, being about 10 years old, it has it's fair share of dents and such, and it has a loose display cable I need to fix (display cuts out and I have to wiggle the screen) but it's still going great!

Depending on the city/county's IT department, lots of cruisers actually have the rugged Latitude's in them. My only main dislike about the Dell is the (fixed) carry handle. I much prefer the Panasonic and Geetac handles better.

That being said, rugged laptops are really overkill unless you are working in outdoor environments or in some kind of field service in an industrial environment. For one, they are heavier. For two, they typically run a generation or two behind on hardware (slow and stable) so performance wise they typically aren't nearly as good. Rugged laptops are one of the only laptops you can buy new today that still have serial ports though (there are some applications where USB-serial adapters simply aren't reliable). Personally, I prefer semi-rugged but I do still have some old school CF-28's and CF-19's laying around for some niche applications that require DOS or Windows 98. If Dell made a semi-rugged variant 5290 2-in-1 I would go after that in a heartbeat as a new EDC laptop for myself just to have the hardware serial port and hot-swap batteries.

I know had my previous employer issued rugged laptops to field techs, they wouldn't have had to replace one laptop after it was dropped from a D9, one that fell out of a van, and another that fell off a rack shelf.

I would consider a plain old laptop if I could find a rugged case that would mate with it perfectly but the only rugged cases I can find are for 2-n-1s and they’re too flimsy.