rockdirect Hardbook review

As you'd expect, the hinges on the Hardbook look they came off a bank vault. There's very little chance of snapping them. However, the lack of an adequate screen catch is a minor annoyance. The two halves of the laptop come apart from each other very easily. Carried loose in a bag, the laptop is at risk of keys or similar objects falling between the screen and the keyboard and scratching the screen. A functioning catch isn't much to ask from a rugged laptop, but somehow rockdirect has overlooked it.

Features
A Pentium M 740 running at 1.73GHz beats at the heart of the Hardbook. This is one of Intel's Centrino range of processors, meaning it offers significant power savings over a Pentium 4-powered laptop, as well as presenting size and weight advantages. The Pentium 4 laptops tend to be behemoths, while the Centrino models are relatively slim. Our review laptop came configured with 512MB of DDR RAM, and this is upgradable to 1GB. RAM upgrades can be performed through a hatch in the base, sidestepping the hassle of dismantling the entire case. On the downside, these hatches -- another allows access to the hard disk -- aren't labelled in any meaningful way. You'll need to have the manual with you to work out which hatch relates to which component. The six-cell battery on the Hardbook is also easy to remove.

A built-in wireless card connects to a range of Wi-Fi protocols and there's also a 10/100/1000 Mbps Ethernet connector that lets you hook up the Hardbook to an office or home network. For more remote locations where there may not be dedicated Internet access, the laptop includes a standard 56k modem with generic phone connector. There are three USB ports, which should be enough for most mobile situations, but you can always extend these using an external hub.

Hard disk capacity on the Hardbook is 80GB. Again, you can extend this by replacing the internal drive with a higher capacity model of the same form factor, or by adding external USB or FireWire mass storage devices. The internal DVD drive can burn both CDs and DVDs, so there is always the option of backing up important data on optical discs.

Performance
Battery life on the Hardbook is rated by rockdirect at 3 hours and we found performance in our informal tests matched this claim. Watching DVDs or running video-editing and other graphics applications that read extensively from the hard disk can eat into this though. Excel and Word ran quickly, as you'd expect from a reasonably fast Centrino processor.

Letting the Hardbook out on the open road, we gave it Hitman: Contracts to chew on. Even this older title exposed the limitations of the on-board graphics. It ran at a playable rate, but anything above the minimum settings made the Hardbook look a little worse for wear. The priority here, though, is not gaming performance, but resilience and durability. We stopped short of actually running a car over the Hardbook, but in day-to-day use we found it survived knocks and bumps and remained scratchless until the day we returned it.

Edited by Mary Lojkine
Additional editing by Nick Hide