Windows 8 on Toughbook CF-Y7?

I am contemplating upgrading my CF-Y7 from XP to 8. Has anyone tried this either on the Y7 or on a comparable Toughbook? Do all the drivers work? Thanks in advance for any insight you might have.

 

I went ahead bought Windows 8 today (through the $14.99 upgrade offer) and installed it on my CF-Y7. The hotkey driver didn't work but all the other Vista drivers from Panasonic's site are working fine. I hated XP and am so glad that after this upgrade, all my computers except the Inspiron 7500 (which is early PIII) now run Vista or newer.

 

Someone posted a few days ago about panasonic on one of there sites having windows 8 drivers for the newer models up. I would try the hotkey driver from there to see if it works.

 

remember also that some of the hotkey drivers work in conjuction with the video drivers (brightness up & down) so if you are running the generic windows video driver even if you have the hotkey installed these will not work. try to download panasonics video drivers or even intels video drivers look for your motherboard. Just my experience on the CF-19 models

 

I installed the upgrade on my T8 and it mostly just works.
Before the upgrade the software evaluates the machine and told me there were 2 programs it had issues with and that needed to be removed?

One was a Displaylink driver that runs my second monitor on USB and the other was the Fingerprint Reader Package.
So I removed them and continued the upgrade.
Well upon rebooting the last time to run Win8 booting stopped at the new Lock Screen and just sat there?
I had no idea what was happening so I swiped my finger and BAM! I was in.

So it evidently natively knows the reader and looks for the already existing fingerprint database and the thing just works so far.
I still have no idea what to do to change anything or if I get a new finger?

I don't use the HotKeys much and haven't checked them yet.

It did see the Touch Screen though and it works fine but I can not imagine using this Tile Fest without one?

Ed

 

Got Windows 8 (32bit) working on a Panasonic CF-Y5. It has 1.5GB ram in it and the performance is fair - pretty well the same as the performance under XP. I never tried it with Win 7 or Vista.

At first I couldn't adjust the volume with the hotkeys fn+F4, fn+F5, and fn+F6 but found one unknown device and used the vista 32 bit hotkey driver then installed the two hotkey packages for vista 32 (from Panasonic's site) and all that is working as it should. Brightness, volume and other misc hotkeys along with their onscreen popups all good.

When I installed the hotkey driver (Device Manager, found the one unknown item, right click it, update driver, and point to the downloaded files), Win 8 threw an exception said it didn't like it and was unsupported or was it incompatible - I wasn't expecting it to work. Finished the hkeyapp and hkeyset installs restarted and was happily surprised when it all worked.

One other issue encountered on the Y5 was video performance in the old game Neverwinter Nights (NWN). The frame rate was less than 1 fps even on the load game menu with all options turned off. Fortunately it was fixed with a driver DOWNGRADE. Went to intel.com and found the Win7 32bit driver for the intel mobile video chipset GMA 945 -the version number 8.15.10.1930 corrected the speed issue completely - at least such that the game is playable again on modest graphics settings. This driver also re-enabled the ability to screen stretch the display to fill it when running as a lower res.