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Just bought a Panasonic Toughbook 27

Question is how tough are they? Will it be able to withstand the rigours of being mounted in the Rangie whilst off roading?

The standard gumph is

Panasonic brings you the Toughbook 27 - the most rugged of Panasonic's Toughbook series. A breakthrough design lets it withstand being dropped from a considerable height and provides excellent resistance to water and dust. A tough magnesium alloy casing, 20 times stronger than plastic, encloses the working components. Inside, the hard drive is shock mounted and enclosed in a protective stainless steel case. Internal dampers also protect the LCD and help prevent screen bending or twisting. The Toughbook 27's fully integrated wireless option provides immediate access to mission-critical information, including 911 call data, motor vehicle and criminal records, mug shots, missing and wanted persons postings, stolen and recovered property reports, and GPS location information. It is ideally suited to construction sites, gas, power or water maintenance work, police or fire patrols and any other rugged field applications. The hard drive is enclosed in a 10mm thick hi-tech gel compound to protect it from those accidental bumps, drops and spills. So take this Toughbook anywhere without worrying about accidents, while enjoying the same performance you'd expect from a desktop computer.

My key concern is the hard drive, yes its in gel, yes it can be dropped 900mm but is this when powered off? Will the heads go crashing into the disks when offroading?

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My key concern is the hard drive, yes its in gel, yes it can be dropped 900mm but is this when powered off? Will the heads go crashing into the disks when offroading?

yes - no amount of "gel" will stop the drive eventually getting damaged - but do you really need a PC on while "offroading"

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Hi Rog

I think "Gentle off roading" will be OK, sooner or later a disaster will hit be it water mud etc, but mine has stood up to a couple of days crashing and banging about OK so far :rolleyes:

"Comp Safari" driving stylee I would say will kill it - just a matter of time.

I have "Rubber :moglite: Mounted" mine, rather than a solid mount, so when the 90 "Crashes down" on something / from somewhere there is some "Give" in the mounting system

I think if it is "Solid" mounted - then those bangs and thumps are going to not help its life expectancy :lol: ??

There must be a vast number of members here who have had GPS Tablets in trucks eventing for some time, ....hopefully you'll get some long term (off) road tests :)

Nige

PS OT - Did you find out re your heads,

I am certain there is no such thing as a Big(ger)Valve / really good / early V8 heads so am dead curious ?,

check to see if you have Double Vavle spings ?

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Just bought a Panasonic Toughbook 27

Question is how tough are they? Will it be able to withstand the rigours of being mounted in the Rangie whilst off roading?

The standard gumph is

My key concern is the hard drive, yes its in gel, yes it can be dropped 900mm but is this when powered off? Will the heads go crashing into the disks when offroading?

Hi,

We use them in the trucks at work and believe me if they survive the daily rigoures of our job they should be well at home in a off road Range rover. Bit fidley to operate though. We have them mounted on the back of a fold down seat.

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...but is this when powered off? Will the heads go crashing into the disks when offroading?

When it's powered off the heads are automatically parked. Modern laptop hard drives are pretty resilient these days. Of course if you're really worried about it just buy an Asus Eee PC , The hard disk is solid state so no amount of bumping and rattling will cause issues for that. Of course you would loose the "toughness" of the tough book, but then you could buy about 10 Asus Eee PC's the price of a typical Toughbook...

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you can kick the carp out of them Rog.

Petal ran a CF27 for two years, it gone ran over, used as a hammer, dinner plate, dropped off the roof onto concrete on countless occassions, faultless navigation even when the car is vibrating enough to blur your vision. its still one of the most popular and sought after models for raid because its so durable. only limitiation with them now is age and the limitations of processor speed, HD capacity, RAM etc when handling and opening big map files in Ozi. is it a Mark 3? and what processor does it have? did you get a CD rom model?!?

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Hi Rog

I think "Gentle off roading" will be OK, sooner or later a disaster will hit be it water mud etc, but mine has stood up to a couple of days crashing and banging about OK so far :rolleyes:

Nige

I cant do gentle mate, its not in the blood! Need some rubber then :moglite:

PS OT - Did you find out re your heads,

I am certain there is no such thing as a Big(ger)Valve / really good / early V8 heads so am dead curious ?,

check to see if you have Double Vavle spings ?

O/T answer:

If you can wait untill next Monday, I should be hitting you hard with some data :);)

But the heads are 1978, with 0.020" removed, but they are fitted with double springs (how did you know they know that?).

The injectors have gone for cleaning today, sent in 22, so should be able to find a decent set??

Then on Sunday, the toughbook is going to get it, just rigged up the inverter, so a few hours of tuning ahead :D

Whats your thoughts on the RV8 prefering a lambda of 0.85 rather than 1?

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you can kick the carp out of them Rog.

Petal ran a CF27 for two years, it gone ran over, used as a hammer, dinner plate, dropped off the roof onto concrete on countless occassions, faultless navigation even when the car is vibrating enough to blur your vision. its still one of the most popular and sought after models for raid because its so durable. only limitiation with them now is age and the limitations of processor speed, HD capacity, RAM etc when handling and opening big map files in Ozi. is it a Mark 3? and what processor does it have? did you get a CD rom model?!?

Hi Jez,

Kick the carp - thats more my off roading style :o

Its exactly like this , but with 64mb of ram, running windows 98 se, yes its got the cd rom, known poor battery - lasts about 5 mins - might respond to some "training" ? Im collecting it tonight, so will confirm more, turns out a friends friend gets hold of them through the utility services, Ill ask on what regularity.

Edit:

Its a Pentium 266mmx, 64mb ram, 4gb hard drive, infra red, usb, serial, parrallel, monitor output, dvd drive, docking station, modem.

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yes - no amount of "gel" will stop the drive eventually getting damaged - but do you really need a PC on while "offroading"

Yes and No, Im tuning the engine in various conditions, on and off road.

Being as I have a "little" quarry to play in, Im going to datalog as much as possible in a true offroading situation.

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I guess that after about 5 minutes of incativity the HDD would power off anyway. If the maps were stored on a solid state memory device (USB key, CF etc) then there would be no reason for the HDD to run. I guess.

Chris

Depends what OS you're running - if it's windows it'll access the disk fairly regularly if the the machine is doing anything at all (including routine system maintenance going on in the background).

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The hard drive just isn't an issue. Think about an average Ipod. Would you think twice about using it in the car? No, of course not. But they contain a very similar hard drive.

The toughbooks are exceptionally tough. Mine has survived falling off the wing and having a can of coke spilled over it. I ran it under the tap to wash it off. Plus a fair bit of driving on and off road.

I'm really really impressed with it!

Si

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I use a CF-18 and never had any problems with it not being tough enough. There becomes a point though where no ammount of rubber bushes, gel mounts or anythign else will help, a hard disk is a spinning glass platter with a magnetic coating, above that is the head - the gap is about the size of a nats penis, bump it hard enough and they come together ending its life. The only way around this is using solid state memory which is affordable upto 8Gb, and obscenely expensive above that!

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I use a CF-18 and never had any problems with it not being tough enough. There becomes a point though where no ammount of rubber bushes, gel mounts or anythign else will help, a hard disk is a spinning glass platter with a magnetic coating, above that is the head - the gap is about the size of a nats penis, bump it hard enough and they come together ending its life. The only way around this is using solid state memory which is affordable upto 8Gb, and obscenely expensive above that!

But how much memory do you need in an in car PC? OS maps for the whole of the UK plus a few places in aerial photos comes to about 1 GB.

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the 20 series toughbooks are the toughest, the teens are good but not as bombproof, the 70's are effectively funkied up laptops and not worth the pennies (IMO)

Rog - see if he can blag you a Mk3, it has a bulge in the casing for the screen for an antenna, the processors were faster, extra ram for them is between £19 and £40 and it makes a BIG difference. some came with touchscreen and others didnt - its not simply a question of loading a driver to a non-touchscreen model. 6gb was (from memory) the biggest HD fitted to a stock CF27 although a 40gb HD can be shoehorned in (some throw a paddy when you do this and refuse to accept that there could be any more storage in the world than 8gb)

if you want to keep a lot of maps, put them on an external HD, get a USB2 PCMCIA(whatever they're called!) card to shove in the side of the toughbook and just shuffle accross what you need when you need it. the USB1 seems to take a loooooong time to do the same job and the infra red port is like waiting for an honest politician.

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25.4gb for all 1:25k , 1:50k and aerial maps

(if you only have 20gb of memory-map maps you may find an extra 1.4gb if you look in the usual torrent places)

external rugged HDD which power from USB drives are one of the best ways of carrying extra maps!

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It must just be the format they're in then. I'm using Ozi Explorer so the maps are effectivly high detail pictures calibrate to the correct grid referance: England, Scotland and Wales comes to 978 MB. Not so useful if you want to do loads of on road navigation but more than good enough for off road navigation.

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What Jez said - the 20's are tough as f***k the only thing that ever killed them on BT was people slamming the screen closed with a screwdriver sat on the keyboard. My CF25 died when I submerged it because it didn't have any of the sealing flaps over the ports like they're supposed to and was powered up at the time. Apart from stupid mistakes like that you can bang nails in with them in the rain and they won't care.

Laptop HDD's can take big G's even when they're not shockproofed and mounted in jelly, as Si said you wouldn't think twice about using an iPod in your car and that has no padding. If you're worried, source a Compact Flash to IDE adapter and stick an 8Gb CF card in with a LitePC version of windows running.

The CF18's are swanky, I've got one under my desk in fact and they're very neat and faster/newer/blinger but nowhere near as tough as the 20's they replaced, they seem like very well made normal laptops rather than full strength military-spec jobs.

Don't look at the eepc, it may have a solid state drive but it's not ruggedised in any other way compared to a normal laptop, plus they're tiny and for the money below spec for what you want compared to a used CF.

And a picture from Dave H on the SLRC norway trip: "I had a Panasonic Toughbook laptop, there was a huge mound of snow... what else could I do but throw one into the other?" :lol:

IMGP0836.JPG

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ahh solid state disks all the way

HDD are not vibration proof- one of the major causes of disk failure is shock damage caused by someone kicking their computer at the wrong time.

go solid state and take the worry away- they are raipdly dropping in price and are rapidly becoming quite affordable!

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