Random question I know, but what brands of laptops are usually used in pitstops in F1 races? I don't watch so I don't know :S
Ferrari used Acer notebooks for a long time, I'm sure they still do. I'm typing this on a Ferrari Branded Acer right now.
It wouldn't surprise me if the choice is more motivated by sponsorship deals and the like, especially for the bigger teams that have some pedigree and prestige to them.
THIS ^^ The teams that have laptop based sponsors will almost certainly be using their sponsors laptops on the pit wall and in the garage, but behind the scenes i'd imagine they use whatever's best for the job. I wouldnt have thought the laptops used on the pit wall would be anything fancy though. off the top of my head Ferrari - acer Williams - philips? Force India - Medion? I cant think if any of the other teams have suitable sponsors.
Pitstops: No laptops, not enough time (whole pitstop lasts between three and four seconds). On the grid, it depends, but it's pretty much just sponsorship deals, because the speed of the laptops never normally matters.
A bit related: I've always been keen to see what brand of laptops they use on the space station! Just imagine the warranty call when everything goes bust... "Ummm.... the graphic card just failed on me, when can you supply a new one via on-site?"
When you watch the coverage the teams tend to use their sponsor's notebooks on the pit wall, but behind the scenes there tend to be rather large numbers of ThinkPads in there. Not always true, and some teams we never see inside their telemetry trailers, but keep an eye out next time you watch a boring race.
I saw an article on The Register a couple of years ago that showed an astronaut with an old IBM Thinkpad running DOS 5.0. According to the article, low power usage & high reliability for simple programs was the name of the game - like you said, there ain't any help desk is space... That said, there is a hangar full of some of the smartest engineers known to mankind sitting around at the astronauts beck and call - surely they can fix anything?
That's the thinking with all flight hardware as far as I know. Keep it super-simple and at maximum reliability. 99.999% of the time speed is irrelevant, accuracy and reliability are what's needed. It's purely from memory but when they refitted the shuttles last they "upgraded" to 800MHz P2's iirc, that was what, 2006? Oooold!
Didn't the USAF improve the original Pentium for use in their projects, and then gave it back to Intel, thus giving the underpinnings of Larrabee? I remember reading about that at the time.
Found it, gawd I am older than I thought, it was 2001! http://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/02/14/in_space_noone_can_hear/ Check out the link in the article (or below) to the larger pic which shows the screen of the Thinkpad... http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/gallery/images/shuttle/sts-98/hires/s98e5004.jpg
