The other Toughbook, research ???

Does anyone know where I can find a good forum covering the Itronix's laptops?

 

I don't think one exists ... It would be cool if one did exist though...

Ohh wait, I forgot (not really), no one uses these laptops .

 

But seriously I would like to know more about them

 

no you dont they suck

I use them for work

 

You may try a Sears repairman forum they seem to be the only ones Ive seen using them. The last guy that came to my house from Sears had one and it took him more time to figure out how to print the invoice then it did to fix my fridge.

 

LOL i work for sears under there other repair outfit named a&e

I use the same gobook the sears guy uses. They are old school and almost don't work anymore. We have had them for more than 5 years and they are piles of junk. Now when we send them back for repair to itronix sometimes they are dead out of the box when we get them back lol

We have a huge account with itronix with more than 20,000 gobooks in the field. We have are own sears support line with them and i tell ya some of them are dumber then dirt.

The max ram is 512mb of pc-100 and they have 800mhz cpu's. The printers are made by extech or something and those seems to be alright but they are just too beat up now to keep working.

We are supposed to be upgrading to new hardware soon and i think they might go with the CF-19 now. Boy i really hope so.

-James

 

No offense James but I'll be that if you had 20,000 CF-28's you'd have the same problem!! ESPECIALLY Mark 1/2's!

 

We had the Verizon guys in a while ago expanding our office system. They were in my office, noticed the CF-30 and we got talking. They said their gobooks weren't too bad, just sorta slow. I restarted the Toughbook for them and they started speaking in tongues. They noticed it wasn't plugged in but I told them I was only going to be in the office for about 7 hours and I liked to charge it once a day so I would plug it in when I got home. They liked how bright the screen was so I showed them it was set at about 1/3 max brightness. At that point I think they got mad and left!
CAP

 

One of my neighbors is always coming up with surplus computers from somewhere. I think he buys a lot of surplus stuff from the FAA. He knew I liked Toughbooks so he asked if I knew anything about the Intronix.

I came up with one group on Yahoo.

http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/ItronixGoBook/

And then just the stuff you find for sale on Ebay. Saw this one in particular and it didn't look to bad. But then again I know zip about there reliability issues.

http://cgi.ebay.com/ebaymotors/Map-...003QQitemZ130284434489QQrdZ1QQsspagenameZWDVW

 

You had me on the flooring laughing.....

:laugh:

 

I would not doubt it most of the techs beat the crap out of these things day in and day out. I guess they were good machines back when we got them they just suck now.

They do hold up well just the features are terrible like the 12" touchscreen that is not very good. They are heavy and are really really slow now. But then again cf-28's are getting to that point now too.

It is just so expensive for the company to upgrade 20,000+ notebooks and vehicle cradles that they are just using these up until they are just dead.

-James

 

20,000 Toughbooks, at a MODERATE price of $4500/each would cost 90 MILLION dollars!! DEAR GOD!.... I had to copy the calculator result into work and blow the font up to 20 point just to count all those zeros

 

And that is why we still have old gobooks lol. It cost them over a million dollars last time we upgraded the HDD's to 80gb drives.


It would be much easier for them to roll out new notebooks in like 200 increments to keep the budget in tact but that would just not work. We need them all changed at once cuz of the software etc that we use.

Then new ones we are getting are going to use sprint air cards for our wireless connection to the office.

Right now we use things called a MBS or mobile base station. They are round dome looking things that sit on top of our trucks and get a GPS and satellite connection. We spend a fortune on this every month. Just think of how expensive a satellite phone is and we have a data setup for more than 20,000 vans. It is great cuz the only place we loose connection is in tunnels. Other than that if we have a pretty clear view of the sky we have wireless connection.

It is pretty neat it uses Wifi to connect from our notebooks to the dome on our trucks and then to the satellite then back down to the office satellite.

The wifi is very strong on the dome and the gobooks. We use the cisco 350 pcmcia cards attached to an internal/external antenna and it goes farther then any wifi i have ever worked with.

-James

 

I didn't mean to torque anyones wrench or anything. The Itronix that I saw on Ebay and what my buddy said he can get looks like it would be faster than my CF-28 MKII. My Toughbook has a 800mhz processor and the memory is maxed out at 768. The Itronix has a 1.8 ghz Pentium M processor and will take up to 2 gigs of memory.

What I don't know about is that Toughness factor. Like my Glock 19, 21 or 22.
Those things are tough. I wouldn't trade one of those for 5 Taurus anythings.
In my humble opinion the Taurus doesn't even make a good fishing weight.

That's all I was trying to find out. I'll keep my Toughbook. It's like the Everready bunny. It's just keeps on working. But at the same time if these Itronix are any good at all it might be neat to get one and take it apart to see what makes it tick.

 

The ix260 is a nice machine it is faster than the cf-28 and cf-29 and they are priced pretty low on ebay.

The ix250 is a slow old machine and not worth the buy unless you wanna use it as a boat anchor.

The gobooks are rugged. We have beat them up for over 5 years and they are holding up decent i mean now they are starting to fail a lot more.

We do not soak them with water everyday but we dock and undock them around 12 times a day 5 days a week and they are not doing to bad. They get dropped and beat around and seem to hold up they are just at the end of there life now.

The options on the itronix gobooks are no where near the toughbooks.

I prefer the toughbooks way over the gobooks but the price on the gobooks is usually much lower.

-James

 

I had a IX250 with all the options. It was a big slow hot heavy brick. The Southwestern Bell guys called them the Tortilla Cooker because they got so hot sitting on the dash mounts in their trucks. I also have had an IX6250, same story, except they were buggy and my last one got condensation between the screen and the out screen cover and died. I'm not impressed with em.

 

We had a few of these floating around for our automated meter reading systems (had no choice of laptops from the vendor we chose). It seems to me for as few of them as we had, they did seem to break down a lot, had to be sent back to the factory for BIOS upgrades, etc. We just got a dozen or so newer models in and they seem to be OK for now. I will ask the guy that works on them and see if he knows of any support sites.

 

I found the Itronix Yahoo forum and spent a couple hours researching them on the internet. Unless I got one really cheap I don't think they are something I really want to mess with. Trying to find spare parts, etc seems to be the hard part. Not much on Ebay or anywhere else.