Biggest Cause Laptop Damage

The first place laptops get damaged is on airplanes, according to our highly informal survey of support managers. That guy in front stretches out, jams the tray table down and smashes the nice new laptop in the process.

“A lot of these laptops are assembled in China, and let’s face it, they are flimsy,” says Long Le, IT director at Atlas Air Inc., a large international air freight company in Purchase, N.Y.

Le oversees 300 laptops traveling to the far-flung reaches of Asia, South America and Europe. Not all of those laptops travel business class, so he sees a lot of broken hinges from tray-table mishaps, as well as cracked screens and cases and parts that just decide to fall off.

But not even business class travelers are immune. At Harvard Business School in Boston, certain unnamed campus leaders and senior managers sometimes forget and check their laptops in their luggage, which makes CIO Stephen Laster crazy. “Laptops are way too fragile for that,” he says, recalling more than a few cracked cases and screens.

But Laster doesn’t stop there. With more than 3,000 laptops under his watchful eye, he’s well aware the delicate machines are simply not suited for life in the real world. There are dangers everywhere: the spilled can of Diet Coke (particularly common at Harvard) or the venti latte (ditto) as well as everyday dangers like the drop into a puddle or the threat of children, who play with mom and dad’s laptop a bit too roughly, and poof, there goes the door to the CD drive.

Imagine the potential dangers in the Manatee County Schools in Bradenton, Fla., where they’ve given each child a laptop of his own. While Tina Barrios, supervisor of instructional technology, says she’s thrilled how well the rollout of nearly 10,000 Apple Inc. laptops has been received by her pint-size customers, she admits it’s taken work to educate them on how to handle their new computing tools.

Of course, there have been a few problems. “The laptops seem to get tripped over a lot,” she says, and then there are those few that have been dropped out of cars or trucks. It’s not always a pretty outcome; luckily, she says, support is in-house.