Got me a couple CF-29's

To start, I've been wanting a decent toughbook for playing around with, and even more so since I've converted my 1985 S-10 truck from carburetor to throttle body injection. I was using a POS cf-28 that did not have a battery and the touch screen was flaky for tuning. This cf-28 was more efficient at turning electricity to heat than the trouble it was to log the data, save to usb and then transfer to another computer.

Where a toughbook was important for this is the serial port and touchscreen. I've got an aldl cable that plugs into the serial port from the throttle body computer, (ecm), to the laptop and using various data logging software, I can see everything the ECM is doing in real time, and later, pull the eprom from the ECM and using an eprom programmer, edit the ECM software.

Anyways, I had been watching fleabay and craigslist for toughbooks locally. One CF-29 I actually thought had promise was on craigslist. Met with the seller and noticed that it was a typical refurb, but refurbed by some shop in Mexico based on the shop's sticker on the bottom. The motherboard model number in the bios did not match the model number on the case. What clued me to that was the ps/2 connector just behind where it was obvious that the case had a usb slot there and it covered part of the ps/2 jack.

Moving on........

I spotted a local seller on fleabay with MK5's for a pretty decent price, to me anyway. Found out that they have a retail store and so I took a drive to their shop. I left with a unit that they were not sure if the touchscreen worked, but that was not a deal breaker for me considering that I got the unit for way less than the unit on fleabay since they had just gotten these. This particular unit only had 4800 hours on it and it was pretty clean cosmetically. The model number is CF-29NAQGZBM.

It did come with a charger, battery, 80g hdd in the caddy and 1.5g of ram. Even though it had a floppy, I was not stopped by getting XP pro on it. The usb to ide/sata adapter cable has already paid for itself. So, pulled the hdd and copied the i386 folder from my dell laptop to it and away we went.

Got xp and sp3 installed. Sadly, the touchscreen does the calibration, but then the DTM error. Oh well. I went back to the place the next day, for this issue, and to see if I could find a serial cable to hack up since they sell a lot of recycled computers that people donate.

I spoke with the manager that I had dealt with and was not interested in returning or exchanging the unit I got, but asked about spare parts from units that were just too ugly to sell or had something wrong with them that made them not worth selling other than for parts. I was told that they had not gotten many that would have been "parts queens", and that they had not gotten many in the lot they had. So, I was offered another at even a better price than the unit I got. Only issue with this unit is the hours. It has 10,500 hours and looks like it was well taken care of. The touchscreen has more scratches on it, but it works perfectly.

The really nice part is that all I needed to do was to swap the hdd's and away we went.

For the time being, the 1st unit will probably just be stored until I find something to use it for.

The second, which has become my daily driver needs the chiclet keyboard cleaned. Apparently there was a coffee spill at some point, so I took the backlit rubber keyboard from the CF-28. Other than the seemingly extra pressure it takes to press the keys, I like that one better than the original. And yes, I prefer xp over any other version.

Also, how in the world do you use the hotkey application? I saw nothing in the user manual about how to program keys. The only thing I'd like is to shut wifi off using that.

Thanks for reading if you made it this far....lol

 

Go to the official toughbook site and download the proper drivers(hotkey...etc.) Links are in the stickies...

 

Got them all, most importantly, the driver for the WLAN for models with the 2nd to last digit being "B". Everything is working properly, I just don't understand how to set up a hotkey, i.e. making the F11 key turn off/on wifi.

 

Press the blue Fn key and the F2 or whichever F key at the same time. Panasonic doesn't have a hotkey to turn wifi on-off

 

Those are working as they should. I.E. FN + respective keys for mute, display brightness, volume up/down.

But what I am talking about is the hotkey application that appears to give the ability to program keys for certain functions such as "opening an application", and others, of which, turning wifi on and off is one.

edit:

O.K., I was actually referring to the "tablet button settings".