So I bought another CF-27...

My cats only had $43 saved up in their Christmas present money fund so I got them a CF-27 Mk. 4 (cf-27lbaghem) for $18.99 (plus shipping) from fleabay. It arrived today (a week late for Christmas I know) and now I just have to set it all up for them.

I was going to give them the Apple iBook that I also just got but it doesn't play AVIs (or even FLVs) and they do love their movies so I've upgraded them from their Mk. 2.

It's the first Mk. 4 that I've encountered so I'm having lots of fun going back through all the old threads on here looking for the right touchscreen drivers and, yes, the sound on this one appears to be dead too.

I'll post some pictures later of my youngest cat interacting with a Toughbook and expressing absolute disgust with the iBook. People may think I'm a bit mad to let my cats play unsupervised on laptops while I'm at work but they love them.

I'm not sure whether or not to replace the rubber keyboard with a plastic one since, although the cats don't actually do any typing (as far as I know), I think the potential for destruction of the rubber keyboard is quite high on their agendas. If it survived a bunch of cops using it for years and years then it will probably survive a 7lb cat's attack but I'll let you know.

Happy New Year, everybody!

 

Let me know if you need any drivers, I've got them all. CF-27s did have sound issues, but not on the later MKs IIRC.
CAP

 

So far I think I have all the drivers, thanks though, except for the touchscreen but that's only because I haven't decided on which OS to install yet. It's probably going to be Windows 98SE since I have the sticker and serial key already stuck to the bottom of this Toughbook.

The touchscreen setup appears to be different on the Mk 4 to the Mk 2 but I've found the threads and will work through them after another cat nap.

 

PM me if you want to run W2K, I like it best for CF-27s and I can probably fix you up.
CAP

 

Yes, I went for Windows 2000. I thought I had all the drivers but I still get one "device found" message looking for "MEDIA". It's not the Hotkey driver, sound, video, mouse/touchscreen or modem. At the moment I've turned it into another "Standard Game Port" and now it doesn't seem to be bugging me.

I also got a blue screen of death after I set the BIOS back to defaults and restarted. I think it was a conflict with the Infrared and the touchscreen so I disabled it (and the modem just to be on the safe side) and everything seems to be working now.

I wish I knew what the "MEDIA" thing was though.

Update

After trying the different combinations in the BIOS, it turned out to be the modem being enabled that caused the BSOD.

I've also turned the media device into "ESS Gameport" not that I even have a gameport at all on this computer.

One little problem though, the Windows 2000 startup bar seems to hang at the two-thirds point for ages before recommencing. I don't get this on my Mk 2s with Windows 2000 (Service Pack 4 btw) so I'm at a loss to explain it. Any ideas?

 

Test by selectively disabling items in the bios
Usualy a hang on windows is a hardware issue , and a fix is the correct driver for the problem device

 

I've discovered that it's definately to do with the ESS Sound driver. It appears that the sound has a "Setup" file so I didn't need to go to each entry in "Device Manager". Doh! Anyway, I'm currently going backwards and forwards between "Safe Mode" and normal login to see if I can sort it out.

When I uninstall normally it just keeps hanging at the two-thirds on the next reboot and then comes up an exclamation mark on "ESS Sound". I may have to wipe everything and start over because I can't seem to get the drivers uninstalled.

Update

I couldn't get the drivers uninstalled no matter how many different combinations I tried so I'm now reformatting then reloading Windows 2000. Next time I know to use the "ESSsetup" in the first place!!!

 

What source are you using for Win 2K?
CAP

 

I copied the i386 directory from my Windows 2000 CD onto the d: partition on the hard drive. Then I formatted c: with a Windows 98 boot floppy, and at the prompt I went to d: and then ran WinNT.exe to start "setup".

This all works properly and I don't choose NTFS until later so it's all running on FAT32.

Windows 2000 loads fine and it all works but it's the sound drivers (from Panasonic.ca) that are messing things up.... or rather I messed things up by not installing them correctly.

 

Hey I have done that before, really fouled it up to ,forcing drivers

 

Well, I tried it again.

I wiped the hard drive, reinstalled Windows 2000... then...

1) I added the video driver - Silicon Motion Lynx Em

2) Added the sound driver - ESS Allegro - using the ESSsetup

and again I got the prompt asking me for a "MEDIA" driver!!!

I added the Hotkey driver and then rebooted... and I still had this stupid prompt even when I went directly to the utils/drivers/sound folder and added the driver from there.

I just gave up and added the touchscreen/mouse driver then rebooted and went into the BIOS and disabled the modem, sound, infrared and parallel port because I was still getting the BSOD after adding the modem.

I don't know what's going on. I downloaded all the drivers from Panasonic, checked them with the same versions from Modly and Toughbookdrivers.com and they are all exactly the same.

cf27_mk2_w2k_hotkey
cf27_mk3_w2k_modem
cf27_mk3_w2k_mouse
cf37_mk2_w2k_video
cf48_72_mk1_982k_sound

(Yes, I know that none of these say "mk4" on them but they are all the right ones according to Panasonic and meant for the LBAGHEM)

Anyone else encountered this? Is there a fix? What am I doing wrong here?

 

Update

After downloading the 93 security updates and 6 pieces of software from Windows Update, I reset the BIOS to defaults again and weirdly it didn't give me a BSOD this time.

I disabled the sound since it doesn't work anyway and I think it must be the faulty hardware that is causing the irregularities with the driver installation and hanging at startup. I tried Millennium Edition too when I first installed the hard drive and I was getting the same slow startup but with a flashing white underline in the top left corner rather than a loading status bar freezing.

On the bright side, now that I've cleaned it all with Windex, the backlit rubber keyboard looks like a new one (it was filthy and I thought it was worn out to start with) plus I got another hard drive caddy and a 3 hour battery out of the deal.

I replaced the rubber feet with bumpers from Wal-mart which are an exact fit. Now all I need is some kind of metal glue to patch a sharp bit of damage on one corner and yet another rear ports cover.