CF-M34 (mk7) and Windows 7

Hi Everyone,

Been a long time stalker of this forum, picking up useful bits of information here and there (esp useful are the Cf-18 and CF-19 Win7 threads)

Anyway, haven't found anyone who has attempted Windows 7 on a CF-M34 - my favourite toughbook of all time.

I've managed to get it installed and running quite nicely so far, I haven't conquered the hotkeys yet and not sure I will as I can't figure out which Panasonic Misc driver to install - never entirely understood how that works since it doesn;t show in device manager.

Here's what is working so far;

Touchscreen (and calibration using driver)
Graphics (using same driver trick for CF-18)
Audio (native support)
LAN (native support)
Wireless (Upgraded to Intel 2200BG 54MBps, using Vista driver).

My model is the rarer mk7,

1ghz Pentium M,
1.25GB RAM,
64GB SSD (Sandisk Half Height SATA III - using IDE adapter, performance is great, but read/write speeds seem capped at 30MB/sec?)

Attached a photo too ... any other M34ers out there?

 

Hi pjcmerritt, Welcome to being an active poster on the Panasonic forum!

I have several Mk7's and would be very interested in upgrading them to Win7. Running 32GB Transcend (IDE) SSDs and upgraded wifi to 600 mW EnGenius. Looks like you have most of it figured out; hotkeys would be a nice plus but not essential for my needs. Please keep us posted on your efforts to get everything working.

 

I'm probably going to purchase either a Transcend or a Kingspec 64gb (ideally 128gb) drive to go in my '34. The Sandisk SATA / IDE adapter appears to be the bottleneck, do you know what sort of read speeds you get out of the Transcend?

Also I wonder if there's a W7 driver for the EnGenius? Have you noticed improved range over the stock card? - There aren't many Mini PCI Wifi cards around that support WPA2 etc ... (hence my choice of the Intel card)

 

~Toughbook Talk~ Toughbook Discussion • View topic - CF-M34 Mk7 Windows 7 / GPS / SATA SSD

I just did the same thing about a week ago. Still haven't swapped ram out in it and a few other tweaks I want to do yet though. When I get all three of my Mk7 units with 1gb stick of ram I am going to do a three way shoot out with them.

Right now on the windows 7 index score I am looking at.
CPU 1.9
RAM 2.9
GPU 1.0
GPU 1.0
DISK 4.9

Crystal disk Mark

SEQ: 30.53 READ / 30.03 WRITE
512K: 30.25 READ / 3.304 WRITE
4K: 11.78 READ / 4.840 WRITE
4K QD32: 12.94 READ / 0.432 WRITE

What did you get for your crystal disk mark scores?

Some of the windows 7 drivers for newer models should work. I used a CF-19 windows 7 Misc Driver on a CF-50 before.

I was still researching on the video driver so I haven't updated that as of yet.

 

Interesting Crystal results, read/write seems stuck at 30MB/sec like mine ... The IDE bus is ATA100 right? So should support higher speeds ...

I've only run another tool (not crystal), I'll run a crystal and compare with yours. What disk are you using? Before my SSD I used a Samsung 100GB 5400rpm drive, which was fairly nippy and had the benefit of lots of room

For the video driver I THINK I followed the same instructions as for the CF-18 video, you have to disable something in windows ... Point 23 from here: http://forum.notebookreview.com/panasonic/418424-howto-install-windows-7-cf-18-mk1.html

I'll have to confirm the video, been doing a lot of custom installs recently and can't remember that well!

It's a bit of a mission, but worth it - my CF-M34 doesn't seem to run aero though, wasn't surprised.

 

I took some computers to fire fighting school last week to work on, I just didn't get back researching the chipset to find the best driver for it. I will just have to do more reading when I get a chance.

I have a Ide to compact flash adapter in one, and IDE hard drive in another with windows 7 on it. I pretty much loaded the OS and had to go do another project. I am not even sure what RPM drive it has it in. If I find time tonight I will drop a 7200 rpm sata hard drive in it and see what data transfer rates it gets on the adapter, or if it has something that can be jumped on the adapter.

My SSD is a Samsung (I think) 1.8" that was factory equipped in a Lenvo. I got it cheap off ebay so I got it for testing. The 1.8's SSD size allowed it and the adapter to fit in the in the 2.5"space. This SSD isn't reconized by Samsung SSD software as a Samsung product. I don't even know if it has trim.

 

Anyone with the IDE to 2.5" SATA techtuff Adapter have any transfer speeds recorded? I think I have the standard adapter for that somewhere to test if needed.