Laptop crash before tuning

[V8 EFI]

Hello,

This morning my laptop crashed, its pretty annoying because i still have a lot of tuning to do (and without its like riding in the dark)

Its probably asked many times before but there mightbe some new ideas rightnow.

I'm thinking of buying a pc tablet, do you guys have any experience with this kind of pc's and what would you suggest ?.

Maybe this is not the right place to ask, in that case does anyone know a site which is ?.

Thanks, Frederik.

[Ruurd]

I'm thinking of buying a pc tablet, do you guys have any experience with this kind of pc's and what would you suggest ?.

Yes I can see that now... Here comes fatty fingered Fred tapping in stuff on his tablet...

[landmannnn]

Virtually any laptop/tablet/netbook/umpc wil do the job. How much you want to spend is the first question.

I have a couple, one a military spec tablet running W2K with a 10" screen, the other a 5" ulramobilepc running windows 7. The umpc has a windscreen mount which makes life loads easier.

[simonr]

I've had great results with Panasonic Toughbooks - I have one CF18 as an every day home PC, I have another CF18 which controls my CNC Mill (being waterproof means it's swarf and coolant proof too) and I use a CFY5 as my work PC.

They are all bullet proof (physically) and ideal for something likely to be used in vehicles, dropped, sat on, used as Frisbee. Despite being fairly low spec, they seem to run remarkably fast too for some reason!

My highest spec machine has an 800 Mhz processor and 512Mb ram - and it is fast enough for Cad software and everything else I need.

Si

[V8 EFI]

Thanks for the replies, they are quit usefull !.

I'm looking for something not to expensive and a bit robust. I'm afraid the panasonic is way to expensive for me for this application.

I've found three items suitable for me so far.

1) Fujitsu LT-C 500; seems to have a serial connector and 10.5 inch bright indoor / outdoor sreen, its light and in combination with a small docking station a lot of extra connections (USB ethernet etc). Windows XP

2) Archos 9; Good looking, 9 inch screen, windows 7 based, kind of slow.

3) Samsung Q1-EX 71G; Also good looking, its got a camera not very important though. 7 inch touchscreen. It runs a tablet version of windows dont know if thats nogood for programs like tunerstudio ?. Also a bit slow.

For now i think the Fujitsu might be a good solution, agree ? Does anyone have bad experience with one of these ?.

Thanks.

And not to forget, they have also a pen for the touchscreen, specialy for my fatty fingers

[elbekko]

There are some laptops (don't remember the make right now, possible HP) that have a tiltable touchscreen. So you can use it as either a tablet or a laptop, which makes it a bit extra usable.

Did me some googling, something like this:

http://www.okobe.co.uk/ws/product/HP+Elitebook+2730P+Laptop+Tablet+PC+12.1+Intel+Core+2+Duo+SL9400+1.86+GHz+2GB+RAM+DDR2+SDRAM+120GB+HDD+with+Microsoft+Windows+Vista+Business/1000010514?ref=1q4bs

[Hybrid_From_Hell]

Megasquirt runs on my 90 as a dipaly via a compac TC1000 off ebay well cehap and active pen etc

Nige

[simonr]

I bought my last CF18 for £100 - I wouldn't buy a new one, they are 3k!

Maybe £100 is still too much?

Si

[dirtyninety]

Why buy a normal laptop and a cheap inverter?

Does it HAVE to be touch-screen?

Also have you looked at smartphones? Im pretty sure i could make my nokia n900 run tunestudio with a little scripting.. you can even overclock a n900 to run at 1gHz stable!

[NicTheOrange90]

DELL XT2 XFR, had mine a few months now, you can pick em up from eblag with DELL warranty, mine has 5Gb RAM, 64GB Solid State hard drive, runs Windows 7 and is my carryaround office.

Would not be without it even in this iPad world.

[jonost24]

I've got my daughters old laptop to use when I get MS fitted. Although I have just bought a couple of Palm Zire71 to have a whizz at when things are up and running. Natty little tools. I got one for 16.50 and the other for a fiver. Result..........probably!!!

[landmannnn]

DELL XT2 XFR, had mine a few months now, you can pick em up from eblag with DELL warranty, mine has 5Gb RAM, 64GB Solid State hard drive, runs Windows 7 and is my carryaround office.

Would not be without it even in this iPad world.

Great bit of kit. Never seen them below £1200 so not that cheap.

[FridgeFreezer]

For MS tuning pretty much any old laptop will do, as long as it can run Windows and preferably has a COM port (although that's getting rarer and rarer these days). It's also a good idea if it's not expensive because life in the car/workshop can be tough, you either want pretty rugged (toughbook, GoBook, etc.) or so cheap it doesn't matter.

Tablets are a tricky one, some are full spec laptops with no keyboard, others are very low-spec or wacky hardware that may only run WinCE. I run a CF18-K toughbook as my "good" laptop and have an Itronix IX250 which pretty much lives in the 109 as a tuning & navi machine and is fairly disposable. Both are touchscreen, both have COM ports and USB. The CF is not as rugged as the older toughbooks like the CF27 and IX250 (you could bang nails in with them, but they're not lightweight and the spec is lower) but it's much higher spec and converts to tablet mode, it's probably plenty rugged enough for most.

One of the best solutions I've seen for general off-road use was a cheap normal laptop mounted up high in a car, then a cheap point-of-sale TFT monitor and USB keyboard & trackball/touchpad on the dash running from it. Non-rugged laptops are cheaper to buy and the other bits are so cheap they're disposable, as long as the laptop is out of harm's way and has enough cooling you're sorted.

When I say general off-roading, this setup did survive tourist class at Ladoga so not too shabby: