Toughbook Y7 questions: speakers, noise, heating, reliability

Hey guys,

First, is there a way to search this forum like the FAQ says? I don't see any search link on the page. I found this one by looking at the source of the page but I'm denied access.

So, excuse the FAQs that follow. I want to buy a laptop between lighter than 5lb pounds, with at least a 14.1" screen, and I narrowed down the choices between the Fujitsu S6510 and the Panasonic Toughbook Y7. They both weigh at 3.7lb (the Fujitsu with the weight-saver option, aka no optical drive).

What concerns me about the Fujitsu are 3 things:

1. speakers - I tested another Fujitsu laptop in a store, and the speakers sounded lousy compared to Toshiba's Harman-Kardon speakers. How are the speakers on the Y7?
2. heating - the review on notebookreview.com mentioned that the temperature of the exhaust gets hot. How hot does the Y7 get? The PCMag review didn't mention. And most importantly:
3. noise - how noisy does the Y7 get? Does it become noticeable if you try to focus on a non-entertaining, silent task?

Finally, I know the Toughbook is built to be tough, but how is its reliability? The data I found so far ( pcworld, pcmag) doesn't include Panasonic. Consumer reports doesn't include Panasonic, nor Fujitsu either.

One more question: The CF-Y7's RAM can be expanded to 2GB. Where should I buy the extra GB chip from, and what model/part# would it be?

Thanks a bunch,
Dan

 

I used to have 2 fujitsu : S2020 then a S2110. Both are AMD based.
S2020 is now about 3-4 years and is near dead : no sound, screen is half dead, lots of noise and lots of heat.
S2110 is 1-2 years , unfortunatly I have to repair it because I use it with inverted polarity then it was ok for 2 months, but now 6 months later , it s not operating well : it boot 1 out of 2 times and wifi comes in 1 out of 10 times when I can boot.
Those are good machines, affordable price, light, good screens, standard components, but they are not sturdy. take care of them.

So I bought an CF-Y7...
More to come in a next post I have a sport rendez-vous right now !

 

back to your questions :
- speakers are pretty good for a laptop.

- heat :
hard disk go from 35 to 40C with ambient temperature. a good thing is I do not see any correlation between cpu temp and hd temp. so the hd is well isolated.
you can stay with the notebook on your laps with no problem.

- noise. y7 comes with a tool : speedfan, so you can change from low-normal-fast speed. normal speed is annoying for me, so I use low speed. I can t ear the fan on low speed with browsing activity.
note that dvd is very noisy. maybe it can get better when it s get older ?

my y7 comes preintalled with vista. i use it like this for about one hour. I have problem with dvd : I can t get it disonnected. It reconnect after some time. then it s seems to malfunction. i got a freeze too, later. fan were always noisy - I didn t use the speedfan utility -

so I install XP. note that you must have sata drivers that are note include in the cd, so you should have a floopy ready - is xp recognize an usb floppy in install ?- or put the driver on the cd with nlite. I think you can even find unhautorized XP with embeded sata drivers on p2p.

I am very happy with XP since then. note that there are about 40 drivers and tools to download from panasonic site.
tools are for power management : for the lan, wlan, dvd and so on. those are light tools, only a fews megs in ram, for those who stays permanently.

You should have a normal to good vision, resolution is high.
keyboard is good.
screen is normal.
I am very happy with my Y7.
comes with core 2 duo L7800 - 2ghz, 120 Go hard disk, and 2 Go micro So-dimm.

 

I've had the S6510 for a few months. The fan can definitely pump out some hot air, I'd prefer dedicated volume controls, and I don't like the fact that the audio jack is on the front. It is very good otherwise though. When I'm using the computer for more than ten minutes at a time, the fan is always on. It is audible from a few feet away, but I'm never bothered by it, and I wouldn't call it loud.

The S6510 will be more powerful than the Y7 because the Panasonic uses a low voltage processor, and it will only be able to support 2GB of RAM. I find the S-Video jack very useful as well, which is something the Y7 doesn't have.

I haven't had the opportunity to use a Toughbook, but if I had a little more money when I bought my notebook, I may have purchased a Y7. They seem to be very reliable and durable. Have you considered a Lenovo Thinkpad X300? It's probably my current favorite thin and light notebook. It is pricey though.

I really like their reviews here:
Trusted Reviews Panasonic Toughbook Y7 Review

 

Yes, Thinkpad X300 is another option you may consider.

I personnaly didn't choose it because I don't want to pay 700$ of the price for the 64Go SSD, and the screen is smaller : 13.3" vs 14.1" for CF-Y7

 

1. speakers: it is a usual story with laptops, speakers are enough for skyping and not enough for listening music
2. heating is not a problem.
3. noise: panasonic fan utility makes it silent. I have spent a lot of time installing an tuning Ubuntu Linux on that PC. Initial problem was CPU never came to C3 state (it means CPU is always wake up, nevertheless frequency is minimal - 800Mgz). As result laptop produced more noise and battery life was worse. I had to configure and recompile kernel many times applying different configuration parameters and right now my Y7 laptop has comparable to XP battery life, noise level is practically the same to what I have under XP when fan is set to medium level. The only problem is USB mouse. As soon as I attache mouse "always wake up" story comes back. They say it is general issue of USB devices under Linux.

What I don't like with the laptop is the it looks and feels cheap. I have another panasonic - R5 - and it is much better regarding material and design. It has ribbed palm rest, panasonic logo is not painted, lid is coated with several layers of lacquer. As far as know panasonic Y4 had all of these features, but for some reason (probably just to reduce costs) next generation of the laptop had been simplified.

 

I would say the review a little bit overrates the laptop regarding screen quality. The vertical viewing angle is not good. Colour has a tendency to blue spectra . Again, from my point of view, panasonic R5 produces slightly better picture quality. (frankly speaking I consider Panasonic R5 as the best subnote I have ever seen. It is much better than FS7xxxx, it is better Sony TX and Lenovo x60)

 

I agree regarding screen quality, vertical angle is not good.

 

A quit note about a feature I just discovered that seems to be undocumented :
the fan control utility -speefan.exe- can be launch by dos command, it accepts 3 parameters for the 3 behaviours, those are /0 /1 and /2.
If you launch the tool without parameter , it launch the gui as usual, with the switch, the behaviour is set, and you won't see the GUI.
Of course you can create a shortcut to launch the tool with a given parameter !

 

Well, to me it is known thing , at least I found speedfan utility in XP registry where it is set to be run during startup using parameters you have mentioned. It seems to me it is not correct to say "dos mode". I would say this is standalone mode. Fan utility requires Panasonic Misc Drivers to be install. As far as I understand the exe file is just simple GUI/standalone programme which tunes fan by the drivers. Unfortunately no chance to have the same under Linux thanks to these Windows drivers, even small chance to run successfully speedfan using Wine or another Linux emulator doesn't work. May be starting XP virtual machine under Linux can help ...

Sorry, probably I am touching Linux theme too much

 

If you have more info about this tool, or if you are able to have more, I know a guy who be very interested : the author of speedfan
Maybe you can help together, he can get info on how it works on windows, so maybe there would be a chance to do something on linux...