Scoble experiences what we all dread:
I pulled my backpack out of the car, flipped it over my shoulder (I hadn’t yet had my coffee) and I heard a sound that I had never heard before. Sounded like metal or glass sliding along concrete.
I knew without looking what it was. My Tablet PC was laying on the concrete. My heart sank. It had fallen from at least four feet onto concrete and I knew from the sound it made that it was not gonna be a good day.
Surprise! It still worked. Actually, maybe I’m not so surprised. Back in the dark ages, when I was a senior editor at the late, lamented PC Computing (later Smart Business), we used to do an annual “torture test” of notebook computers. The last one appeared in 2002, just before Ziff-Davis pulled the plug on the magazine. Marty Jerome and the PCC Labs crew devised a thorough set of tests that every unit had to go through: freezing cold (as if you had left it in the trunk overnight in Buffalo in mid-winter), extreme heat (same deal, only think Phoenix in the summer), a coffee spill on the keyboard, and of course the infamous drop test.
I remember Marty once telling me that the testers were always reluctant to push that first notebook off the drop table and watch it crash. The whole act flew against the spirit of everything they had ever learned about safeguarding a computer. But by the end of the test they were smiling and laughing, almost diabolically, as they went about their business of destroying really expensive brand-new computers.
Then, as now, the Toshibas were extremely well-engineered. I’ve got a two-year old Toshiba Tablet PC that’s still running strong. Never dropped it, though, and I hope I never do.
If you want to take a stroll down memory lane and see some of those old notebook torture test results, try this Google search. And if you want to protect your notebook, think about knitting your own laptop case.
Ed Bott 
My one experience with laptop/concrete collisions was not as happy as Scoble’s. About 23 years ago, Epson came out with the HX-20, a notebook-sized computer that had a 4-line 40-character LCD display and used a microcassette as its mass-storage device. It was actually quite a machine for its time. I had an early production prototype on loan from Epson, as I was working on documentation for the computer at the time.
One day, I dashed out the door of my second-story condo with the HX-20 and a notebook binder under my arm. As I hit the top of the outdoor stairway, the HX-20 went a-flyin’. It hit the concrete about 10-12 feet below, and I still vividly remember the sight of keys flying everywhere as the case seemed to explode. I tearfully gathered up all the pieces but it was hopelessly beyond repair.
I continued to write for Epson for many years after that incident–but never again about portable computers!