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New member here, want to thank "Toughbook" for letting me know about this great, busy forum!
A little about myself.. I worked for an industrial automation distributor in the 90s and we sold notebooks as a sideline business. We were selling Dolch and Fieldworks at the time, which were fine, rugged machines but were crazy expensive (>$10K). We got word in '99 that Ford was going to do a massive computer upgrade to coincide with the Y2K scare, but our present offerings of rugged portables didn't hit their price target. That's when we found out about Toughbooks. They were the perfect combination of ruggedness, performance, and a reasonable price. It also helped that we were driving distance from the biggest toughbook customer in the world (and also the only one to buy directly from Panasonic), Universal Data. They integrated toughbooks into rugged suitcases and added various peripherals to the package as their customer requested. For us, we basically needed the suitcase just as a "theft deterrant" and to hold the various programming cables that were required.
We promoted the CF-25, but ended up selling mostly 71s. (all parties involved were to eventually regret this) The 25s held up admirably, the 71s considerably less so. In total, we sold about 800 units.
So from that point forward, I was spoiled for anything but toughbooks. I've still got the 25 that I bought 7 years ago, and it's still holding up like a champ. It has fallen to concrete floors more times than I can count, been sprayed with coolant, hydraulic oil, welding sparks, etc. It just keeps on ticking. It also amazes me that it is only a pentium 166. It seems to run pretty fast compared to other notebooks in the same class.
I stepped up to a 27 a few years ago. This is still the machine I used most. The main thing I prefer about it is the 13.3" screen.. The higher resolution helps a lot.
I picked up a 600 MHz 28 last fall, but never did much with it. Probably because of the 12" screenI got a 1 GHz 28 (with a 13" screen) several months ago and have been doing some experimentation with it. I haven't used it much because I'm still struggling to get windows 98 working on it. I've got some old software I need to use occasionally and it needs to run in the older environment. (Actually I just need DOS, but I figured it would be nice to have W98 working as well!) My main hang-up is the video driver. Looks like Intel supports this chipset in 98, but I havent had any luck making it work. So I guess at some point I'll just give up and leave it be, or maybe one day I'll finally get it figured out.
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Yup, this looks like the place to be. There's several other (dead) toughbook forums, the Yahoo group has some pretty good information and moderate traffic, but this is by far the most skilled group of hardware hackers I've found to date
Hello!!
Discussion in 'Panasonic' started by gravitar, Sep 6, 2007.
