Case Study: Rugged Notebook PCs Are On The Case

By Brian Albright, Field Technologies magazine

Laptops have been a fixture of police cruisers for years — officers use the in-vehicle computers to check license numbers, receive assignments, access maps, and fill out reports. While there are a wide variety of options when it comes to laptop and notebook computers, highly rugged devices provide a greater degree of reliability and longevity in law enforcement applications.

The police department in Noblesville, IN, a community of some 52,000 north of Indianapolis, is in the process of upgrading its invehicle computers to the GD8000 notebook from General Dynamics Itronix, a highly rugged computer that meets MIL-STD 810G and IP65 standards. The Noblesville police department has had laptops in its cruisers since the 1990s, but switched to its first iteration of General Dynamics notebook units nearly a decade ago.