Most laptops are treated well by their owners.

Occasionally, accidents happen, or laptops are mishandled, and they quickly start to look and feel “aged”.

On one occasion, I saw a laptop that obviously had a hard life.

The laptop had some unusual problems:

• The power socket felt loose when the power was plugged in.
• Some keys on the keyboard would sometimes not work.
• The power button had “lost” its LED backlight.
• The CD/DVD drive would sometimes “disappear” from windows vista.
• It recently had its hard drive replaced by another repairer.
• I needed to re-installing vista, and the customer asked me to re-install office 2007… But i found the CD was scratched… I couldn’t install office.
• The owner had another laptop… The keys in the middle of the keyboard (clustered in a circle… About the size of a fist) were about 2 mm lower than the rest of the  keyboard!

All this made me think: there is probably a market for rugged laptops that can take some abuse… Both hardware, and some kind of self-healing software.