The Microsoft Reliability Lab is where the tech giant tests its hardware to the limits, dropping devices, soaking, smashing and bending them, in a quest to find out where the weaknesses lie.
In the latest episode of Microsoft’s regular "On the Whiteboard" series, presenter Pamela Woon takes a look inside the Reliability Lab as Microsoft does its best to try and destroy a whole bunch of Surface PCs.
According to Jonathan Lehl, test engineer, the labs are by far one of the most secret buildings on Microsoft’s campus. "We control our access to this building very heavily," he says in the video. "We have testing going on that we do not let the public know about". Well, until now presumably.
Ben Reed, who works on Surface certainly seems to enjoy his job, saying of the labs, "You know I think about this facility kind of like a medieval dungeon, where each room has a device that is a torture chamber with a different torture in each one. In some they’re being dropped, in others they’re being put through extreme temperatures… I think I’d be pretty frightened if I was a device and I was in this building".
Some of the tests shown include Surface tablets being used as bowling pins, being driven over by a car, and of course being dropped.
It all looks like great fun, even if there’s a fair bit of fiction mixed in with the reality of the stress testing that goes on behind those closed doors.