Batch of CF-74's hitting the market

I have two working units, they look like they were originally used by Farmers Insurance, they are a little bit abused with 9000-10000 hours as an average. Model CF-74GCE01BM with Heartland part stickers that have 2010 dates. Both the batteries and power supplies are genuine Panasonic, but they are used.

Compuvest (43 in stock ~$490ea, Vista business and XP available, 45 day warranty) and Overstock are listed as having them.

Buyer beware, I purchased five and three are currently RMA'd for speakers and/or touchscreens DOA.

You may need to return a few before you get a good one, or ask them to open them and start them up to test the sound and the touchscreen before sending it over. They can do that on the XP pre setup screen without agreeing to the EULA, there should be music on the pre-setup, and the touchscreen should be functional. I don't know how willing they would be to do this, (ask nicely) but they should want to save the trouble and cost of the RMA process.

I want to try one of those new Intel 311 20gb slc ssd drives ($129.99 on Newegg) and see how fast they can go!

Ubuntu 11.04 x64 almost perfect out of the box, except the touchscreen calibration is 1/4" off at the screen edge, and I can't find the calibration utility that they had in 10.10.

Error report:
15 Total CF-74's purchased
#1 Good
#2 Good
#3 Bad touchscreen
#4 Bad speakers and touchscreen
#5 Bad speakers
#6 Good
#7 Good
#8 Good
#9 Good
#10 Good
#11 Bad X-axis on touchscreen
#12 Bad speakers
#13 Bad speakers
#14 Bad speakers
#15 Bad speakers

Be very careful! I had a 50% failure rate, and they have so far refused to give a full refund when a unit has bad speakers! Final result, they refused to refund the restocking fee, and I refuse to buy from them again. It was a driver issue which they should cover (they installed the wrong driver which has a significant bug), but apparently the hardware is fully functional.

Speaker issue appears to be a driver bug, please try installing the Panasonic drivers before sending the units back!

 

What would an old CF-72 1,8 Ghz will be worth nowadays ?

 

Well I have seen them for $80.00 to $300.00

 

C'nkid,
http://forum.notebookreview.com/panasonic/524581-ubuntu-10-10-toughbook-version-12.html#post7197894 Post 120 exactly.
You owe me though. I'm doing a survey. Please post results of:

If ya have a CF-Anything running Linux, I'm interested. I'm looking for SynPS/2.

Have a day,

Jeff

 

I picked up one , a mk1 version with 1400 hours on the clock a little worn but is amazingly fast for a core duo for about 300.00. was hoping to see if it could be cpu swapped. NOT! but still a good unit and have been using it a lot lately. just can't figure out how to recalibrate the touchscreen as there seems to be no icon or program that I could find to do this. must keep searching...Driller

 

The touchscreen calibration programme is called CALWIN.EXE and is installed along with the touchscreen driver. On my CF-74 the programme is located in "c:\Program Files\FIDTPU\WIN2K".

Sorry - shouldn't be reading the forum after a 13hr shift. I didn't take in the fact that you're running Ubuntu and not Windoze.

 

Ubuntu 11.04 x64 results:
(NO HAL IN 11.04 not even in the repo)

Ubuntu 10.10 x86 live cd results:
info.product = 'SynPS/2 Synaptics Touchpad' (String)
input.product = 'SynPS/2 Synaptics Touchpad' (String)

The touchscreen is a USB device in the CF-74, not a serial device as I think it was in the CF-29.

 

The 20GB Intel 311 SLC SSD in the CF-74 hits a whopping 270MB/sec read average! And a 115MB/sec write average! (unpartitioned drive) I am suitably impressed by this very inexpensive SLC SSD SATA drive. Feels instantly fast like my old CF-29, so I think this one is going to my brother! Of course I have six more working CF-74's to play with.

These SSD's are seriously THE ticket for every toughbook with a SATA drive @ $5/GB! If you are willing to give up instant access speeds for more than 20GB of storage space, IMHO you need to rethink your storage needs.




I also figured out that the sound issue was due to them installing the wrong driver, once I installed the new driver it still had to "initialize" the driver in Windows before it would work in Windows or Ubuntu. Very strange bug. Thankfully it is very easy to swap out the drive and boot windows with the proper driver, then I can pull the drive and boot back to Ubuntu.

I also figured out that the old xinput_calibrator program works perfectly with Ubuntu 11.04 on the CF-74. Now it is perfecto! And the used battery is good for about 5 hours on the CF-74 with the SSD.