Lenovo Throws Laptop From a Plane, Gives It 10 Seconds to "Boot or Bust"

Posted 07/14/2011 at 8:44am | by Paul Lilly

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We've long dreamed of a day when our PCs would spring to life the instant we press the power button. Solid state storage, gobs of RAM, and intelligent boot order routines have made the startup process a lot faster than it used to be, but we're still not at the point of instantaneous boots. You can, however, boot a Lenovo laptop with "Rapid Boot" technology in 10 seconds, and to prove it, the OEM builder pitched a ThinkPad T420s laptop from an airplane giving it a short window to boot up and deploy a parachute or plummet to its death.

In the first video above, you see the ThinkPad tossed from 12,500 feet in the air. According to Lenovo, they calculated it so the laptop has just 10 seconds to boot up, deploy the parachute, and land safely on the ground, which of course it does. But are viewers being bamboozled by editing wizardry?

The answer is no, and in a second video (not yet uploaded to YouTube but viewable here) that's arguably cooler than the first, Lenovo gives a behind the scenes look at how it was done. In it, program designer and software engineer for West EFX, Alec Ow, explains that he wrote the program that automatically fires up once Windows 7 is loaded. The program prompts the CD drive tray to eject, which in turn triggers a switch to deploy the parachute. Very cool indeed.