My Passion of Toughbooks

Hi.

I just wanted to introduce myself.

And to explain about my interest in Toughbooks.

It started 11 years ago with the purchase of a 1 year old used cf-25 166
If you have not seen a cf-25 before, it was truly amazing for it’s time.
For those of you that have only had a newer toughbook that’s where we get the word hard drive Gel as the hard drive was surrounded by a sticky gel.
( The new toughbooks use foam)
The upgrades over the years included maxing out the ram to 96mb,changing the 10” display to 12” and adding a cd drive.
I installed w95, w98,wxp on it over the years.
(xp did take a while to boot)

Then about 6 years ago I replaced it with a cf-28 mk-2
I easily increased the ram to 512mb
I replaced the keyboard with a rubber backlight model from a cf-27.
The cd to dvd-cdrw upgrade was a lot harder.
There was very little info available a few years ago on modifying Toughbooks.
NBR was not around at that time .

I joined a toughbook forum in Germany.
Wow that was lots of fun using bablefish to translate German to English to read and post.
You really have to be committed to go through all that.
I researched on the internet the cd drive issues, and put a small jumper wire on the caddy connector to get the dvd to boot properly.
The dvd/cdrw drives were rare at he time and selling in the $450 range for new ones

I could have made a fortune at the time selling converted cd drive caddy’s on ebay.

I didn’t keep the cf-28 for long though as I needed usb2 and built-in wireless.

That meant a new cf-29 mk1 in which I upgraded the ram to 768mb replaced the cd drive with a dvd-rw drive I replaced the keyboard again with a rubber backlight model from a cf-27.No trouble as they only have the 2 connectors on them.
I replaced the hard drive when Hitachi came out with the 7200 rpm 60gb model.
I read complaints on the forum as to the cost of these rare drives.
You don’t want to know how much I paid for it when the 7200 rpm drives first came out, but to give you an idea of the price the only notebook manufacturer that had them as an option was alienware.
I travel quite a bit so I decided that a smaller toughbook would be easier on my arms.
A cf-m34 700 was purchased and has worked out well .
No modifications I just kept it stock.
Last year when I saw the new cf-30 and cf-19 I knew I had to get one , my cf-29 is still fast enough and the main benefit on these new models is the great screen for outdoor use, that meant replacing the cf-m34 with a cf-19 .
I maxed out the ram to 4gb and upgraded the hard drive with a Seagate 7200rpm.

I use this all the time now ,the small keyboard is a issue sometimes, thank goodness for spellcheck.

I joined the forum a few weeks ago

What a Group of enthusiasts we have here

I am amazed at the collective knowledge in these forums

I have read 6 months back in the Panasonic treads
Wow you members have been doing some interesting Mods.
The newbie’s have it easy here .

Alex

 

kool man

hope i one day have a story to tell about thinkpads

im 16 nd got my first one 8mnths ago

nd a theres still a long life ahead of my 2 build up a thnkpad collection

 

Tomcat... Welcome to the forum! Yes... We are fanatics also. I started out with the CF-28s then 29s and I finally ponied up the ducats for the CF-30. I mainly build CF-29s now but still have a bunch of CF-28s that I need to eventually get set up and on ebay.

Welcome to the club!