The Toughbooks for Entertainment?

Can the Panasonic Toughbooks be used for entertainment since I've heard it's all about business and survivability?

By entertainment, I mean listening to music, watching videos(HD) and playing games like Fable and Mirror's Edge or even an MMORPG like Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning?

 

not really. you could watch movies, but games won't run very well due to the (relatively) low-end specs.

 

Not recommended

The Toughbook models have business class hardware inside, so you are limited to integrated graphics

The screen size and resolution is an issue as well will most models
The only exception is the Toughbook cf-52 which has a ATI Radeon HD 3650 graphics,which by current gaming standards would be considered low-end and the display specs are 15.4" widescreen 1920 x 1200 WUXGA

The Vista report tool shows a gaming graphics score of only 3.5 in my latest toughbook
That’s fine for a challenging game of solitaire , but not what most people would expect for gaming

For watching movies no models are available to date with blu-ray drives


Alex

 

For games you should buy a gaming notebook, unless you are playing Hearts or pinball on XP... Movies do well as I use my CF-30 on flights to watch them and the screen is fine for me... I don't need HD anywhere except in my media room.

You can listen to music and even stream it wirelessly if you want. Just about any laptop can do that... But not too many can survive what this one can. You buy a Toughbook for durability and being able to go anywhere with it. I wouldn't waste the money for gaming...

 

Warcraft 3 plays fine on my CF-29. 800x600 though...

Thats about the upper limit of it! XD

 

Warcraft 3 plays GREAT (and WOW), also command and conquer generals on my cf-30.

As Rick, J and Alex have stated however - it isn't designed to do graphics... For all practical purposes this laptop works great with music and whatnot and being that the speaker on the CF-30 is a lot better than the CF-29's speaker.

 

I find it entertaining to shove mine off of a table and send it careening across the floor in front of friends, then dumping a cup of water all over it before picking it up and start surfing the web again. Ahh, their looks are priceless...
and it's fun too!!!

 

I played some Red Alert 2 with my roomie on two of the toughbooks when we went camping last summer. Gaming won't get much more intense than that on these things though.

 

RA2 for the win!!! Don't forget about the Yuri's expansion though!! lol... ohh I remember being a freshman in high school 8 years ago playing that game

 

I have a CF30 with a solid state drive and maxed out RAM. Runs PhotoShop and other tasks that can be graphic intensive and runs very fast. If you were to get one of the Business Rugged Toughbooks with a stand alone graphics card and go with a solid state drive, I'm sure it'll run many games.
I'll be doing some testing on a CF-30 MK2 with more access to shared ram. Since I'll be running the max amount of ram, the graphic card using more ram is not that big of a deal to me. Just a thought.

 

Hi.

I've got a CF-F8 toughbook and I've been looking at how well it can be used as an entertainment PC.

Video and music certainly isn't a problem, if you have high def video files then they will work - although the internal speakers are very weak.

I've tried a number of games of it: MAME, Free Civ, Res Evil 4, Tiger Woods 08 and all run well, so there is plenty for games to pass your time but the latest games will struggle.
Videos of Mame and TW 08 are on my blog, so that you can judge how well they run.

Cheers all.

 

I'm looking into a way to discreetly upgrade to a different speaker system in my 29. I hate the single mono speaker on the bottom. When my parts laptop comes (hopefully tomorrow) when I have the motherboard out and stuff, Ill be looking for somewhere.

I'm thinking about somewhere near the handle and up front there but space is limited.

I'm going to use the speakers out of an old Compaq XL1200 I have.

 

I do MEchwarrior 3 on a cf-28.

 

On my CF-27 Half-life and Lego Racers play fairly well, although with all the settings turned down as far as they'll go. I'm getting a CF-18 soon so I'll see how that is. I had an Acer Travelmate C110 which has similar specs to the CF-18 and that was able to play GTAIII and even Half-Life 2! Only just though, most of the settings had to be either very low or lowest and HL2 played at about 5fps when looking at water. Still pretty decent though!

 

Good luck with the speaker upgrade - the Cf-f8 has stereo but they are very very weak. My acer aspire one sounds much better