Dino Londis: On Bullet-Proof Laptops For Angry, Geeky Dads

The 15-year-old girl whose laptop was shot nine times by her father will have to pay to replace it — along with the nine hallow point bullets he used to destroy it. The video is below, in case you missed it.

But the whole thing makes me wonder. Is there any laptop for an ungrateful teen — one tough enough to let you rant about your parents on Facebook and still withstand a point-blank attack? I took a look.

NEW YORK: The 15-year-old girl whose laptop was shot nine times by her father will have to pay to replace it — along with the nine hallow point bullets he used to destroy it.

The video is below, in case you missed it.

But the whole thing makes me wonder. Is there any laptop for an ungrateful teen — one tough enough to let you rant about your parents on Facebook and still withstand a point-blank attack? I took a look.

So I pissed off three dads and asked them to shoot their daughters’ laptops to see which help up best from 45 caliber hollow point bullets.

Of course, normal dads don’t wake up angry. So I asked their daughters to post some churlish rants about them, specifically asking them to focus on their hats.

After reading the posts, the fathers I selected shot an Asus Zenbook, a Sony VAIO, a Panasonic ToughBook and a Macbook Air. In all cases the laptops where completely trashed, but the Macbook Air still looked the best afterward.

No manufacturer I spoke with would guarantee that that its laptop would withstand shots at such close range. One sales guy at Presales Panasonic told me that “their Panasonic Toughbook, even the Fully Rugged are not certified to withstand bullets.”

So girls, even if you have a Panasonic ruggedized laptop, keep your parental Facebook rants to yourselves please. Stick with back-handed compliments, thinly veiled innuendo and a plain old fashioned code.

The closest laptop I found to bullet-proof, by the way, in fact was the Dell Latitude E6420XFR Fully Rugged Laptop. With a base of $4,532 a girl can feel protected with its so-called BallisticArmor exterior and “testing to high defense-grade standards.”

Though a solid-state hard drive is standard, I suggest saving to the cloud in case the drive is shot, pun intended. The Dell sales consultant stopped short of saying it could prevent a 45 caliber bullet from penetrating at such close range — but this is the kind of notebook an ungrateful daughter can post her feelings about her dad with a greater sense of security.

And I was kidding about getting dads to shoot perfectly innocent laptops.

Isn’t that illegal?

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