Was there ever a copy available of the US Pilot? I've been looking for a long time. Would appreciate any pointers on where to look.

You can spend a lot of money and buy a ruggedized laptop ( panasonic toughbooks are the best known examples and they have a range of models from semi ruggedized to fully ruggedized ).

However the feature you want from the ruggedized unit is the fact that fully ruggedized laptops are setup to be fanless ( the better designed ones ). Fanless means they don't need to suck in air, which would need to be filtered, which then becomes a point of failure.

So for example most netbooks for example run an atom cpu that just needs a heatsink and no fan. That then eliminates the point of failure of the fan sucking in dust. There are desktop choices that are the same, underclocked or low power cpu's that don't produce enough heat to need more then a heatsink so can run fanless.