By Willow (willowashmaple.sbs, formerly of willowashmaple.xyz)
July 23, 2024
It was one of those days. I had a 20-ounce plastic bottle of Vitamin Water and a similarly sized plastic jar of peanuts. I was working on something. I thought I grabbed the jar of peanuts. Instead it was the Vitamin Water, roughly 3/4 full.
I had accidentally poured approximately 15 ounces of Vitamin Water all over my laptop. It's one of those cursed incidents anyone would dread.
Supposedly Chromebook is built to withstand those events, considering that lots of schoolchildren use them, and school districts and government agencies buy them. Still then, I did not expect my laptop to survive this.
Yet, all keyboard and trackpad functions survived unscathed, and the audio speakers work just as good.
And this is a $249 ASUS model I bought used for $100.
Aside from no dime goes to feed Microsoft, and the modern Chromebooks are shipped with a full Debian installation that can be activated with a few clicks, this may be the most badass computers I have ever owned.
It turned out that all ASUS laptops are now tested against the MIL-STD-810 durability standards used by the U.S. Department of Defense, even the lower-end consumer models. That is a big leap from the days of the flimsy EeePC (I used to have an EeePC 900, which also shipped with Xandros Linux pre-installed, but after a while I decided to install LinuxMint LXDE -- and later PeppermintOS when LinuxMint dropped LXDE; even though ASUS marketed the EeePC as quite durable it was actually very flimsy).
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