Panasonic Toughbook CF-18 first impressions
I’ve recently bought a Panasonic Toughbook CF-18 second hand of eBay for use at work. I chose this laptop as a replacement for the Advent 4211-B (MSI Wind) that I bought for work (as and electrician) about 12 months ago but was too slow and not robust enough. I paid £285-00 for the CF-18 which was about the same as the Advent cost me. It turned out to be a better buy than expected as it I found it to be a MK3 and not a MK2 as advertised.
Condition wise, though it has clearly had a lot of use it wasn’t too bad, not much more than paint missing from the corners and a few marks to the exterior. Function wise the only fault is the sound from the speaker is very quite, barely audibly, the cause of which has not yet been ascertained, removing all the particles of metal that had stuck to the speaker made a little difference. I had budgeted on needing to buy a new battery due to it’s age so it came as a pleasant surprise to find the included battery will run it for about 5 hour, what an improvement on the 1-2 hours of the Advent.
I didn’t expect too much performance out of this CF-18, after all it’s only got a 1.1Ghz Pentium M processor and 512Mb of ram but again I was pleasantly surprised, it was brought specifically to run the software I use at work, Tysoft Easycert, which it runs extremely well.
Putting Windows XP Service Pack 2 on slowed it down a bit but it’s still copes well, and of course having to install anti-virus software slowed it down a bit more but using Comodo doesn’t seem to be as much of a drain on resources as many of the AV packages I’ve tried in the past.
This CF-18 is a model with a digitiser in it which has impressed me. As an alternative to a mouse in tablet mode it works well, apart from the need to calibrate if the viewing angle changes, due I think, to the distance between the plastic screen cover and the digitiser itself. I have the most appalling handwriting and didn’t expect the handwriting recognition software to be able to cope with it, but it does, very well, though the new version in service pack 2 doesn’t seem quite as good. Still to try Panasonic’s version.
I had expected to need to do all the hardware upgrades to this laptop that are possible, however based on my experience so far I think all that will be done is to put some more ram in it and if funds permit change the hard drive for a solid state one.
To conclude these first impression I can say that the CF-18 has found favour with me and my Advent netbook will soon be finding a new home via eBay. I’m hankering for another of these Toughbook’s to play with Linux on, but I’ll have to find a way to sneak it into the house passed the wife.
