New guy here, painted my CF-28. Opinions?

Recently picked up a 1GHz CF-28 for my son to hammer away on as an infant, then to teach basic computer skills when he's a bit older. I figure it's cheaper than repairing our laptops when he eventually breaks one. Plus it gives me an excuse to finally buy one of these things.

The outside was fairly scratched up, so I painted it using automotive primer, metallic graphite automotive wheel coating, and several coats of clear. Having used the Duplicolor wheel coating in the past, I know it holds up to abuse fairly well.

The inside has almost zero perceptible wear, and could probably pass for new. Judging by the wear on the outside, I imagine this unit was toted around a lot, but rarely used.

I've purchased a 512MB stick of the correct Kingston RAM, and will be upgrading the hdd to a faster unit. For now it's running a highly-tweaked installation of Windows XP SP2, and seems to be working well so far.

Opinions on the paint job?

 

From what I can see it looks darn good, like the color too

 

Thanks! I figured that graphite/anthracite would work well. I had all the painting supplies in the garage, so I was able to do the entire project without spending a dime.

I paid $100 for the Toughbook, but it included the hdd caddy, a good battery, and it was in fairly decent shape.

Always wanted one since using them when I was active duty Air Force SF.

 

Looks good. I got all 4 of my kids (plus my ex-step daughter) a CF-28 (MK2,3) the only problem I had out of them was the keyboard, they kept popping keys off. I upgraded my youngest two boys to the rubber keyboard and that solved that problem. The other problem is that my daughters 28 developed a power port problem, I was told that her step brother was doing some jerking on the cord before it happened. They have all gotten older I have been working on upgrading them to a newer model. They like to game some so I went with the CF-73 MK3 (1.7ghz/ATI 9000) I still need parts to finish up the other units I got, but the first one works great.

 

Nice work.... Like the color!

 

Niiice... I am running XP performance edition, which seems to about double the speed of my cf-28...Highly recommended!

 

Performance Edition??
Lemme guess, tweaked out, pirated warez?

 

ADOR, you REALLY have the Toughbook disease eh? MAN ALIVE! LOL!

 

looks real good makes me think of panting my cf-30

 

And think it all started out with one CF-28 LMAO, On the first batch of toughbooks for my kids I ran across a sale on ebay from a police department 6 Mk2's and 2 Mk3 for under 300 shipped. I couldn't believe anyone wasn't bidding on them, all had restore disks, rubber or emmissive keyboards, caddy with harddrives. So after a reload the kids were ready to go. I think it was a very good first computer for them. Now these CF-73's are going to cost me a lot more than that to finish up. I have 3 more to complete.

 

Hey you guys didn't think too highly of my Purple and Lime Green Cf-29's for my girls...

Looks good. I also did one in a dip in camo.

 

Good point. I'm not a fan of the feel of rubberized keyboards, but I'd much rather deal with that than have him always popping the keys off. Looks like I will be upgrading to backlit keyboard after all.

 

Interesting. Reading the description on TPB, it looks to be a tweaked and tuned version of XP, which is basically what my CF-28 is running. I just did it all manually.

 

I see the same thing happening to me. Don't tell my wife.

 

My wife supports my disease...

She loves her CF-19 with the emmisive keyboard!

 

If it wasn't for the need for better graphics I probably would of went with the CF-29. Just swapped there cd drives and keyboards over.

 

we need secur the toughbooks we do not need em used as a iron skillet against us