Toughing it Out

[kevin_standlee]

The replacement power supply for the Toughbook CF-27 arrived today. After lunch, Lisa plugged it in and the power light came on, which was a good sign.

She booted the machine and the Panasonic POST screen appeared, which was good. Then Windows2000 started to load. Good. Login screen appeared. Not so good, because Lisa isn't used to these (her WinXP machines are configured as single user), but we Alt-Ctrl-Del'd to the login, which showed user Administrator. We tried the password the machine's former owner gave us. No luck. We tried every reasonable variation of the password. Nothing. Phooey!

Next idea: Try swapping the hard drive in the Toughbook with one of the known good hard drives (with WinXP) that we have in stock. As we have several out-of-service IBM T30s, each with a valid XP license, this doesn't seem like software piracy to us. Lisa went and got one of the other drives and removed the Toughbook's hard drive. Wow, what a casing it has! Double-insulated against shocks, it is just the sort of thing you want to have if you find yourself dropping your computer off a table regularly. Unfortunately, the computer refused to boot from this drive. It POST-ed, but didn't even get to the load screen. Phooey.

So we went back to the other drive and took the computer to her father's house, where I did some research. Google Is My Friend. I found a site (that I can't link to here because I'm logged in through work and found this page, which led me to utilities you can use to clear the administrator password on a Win2K machine. But how to make it run? The Toughbook doesn't have a CD-ROM drive, how how was I supposed to use the downloaded files?

I asked Lisa, "do you happen to have a USB floppy drive and some blank floppies?" By golly, she did! She went and got them, and I downloaded the utilities that made a bootable floppy and hard drive drivers necessary to get at the hard drive on this new machine. Following along with the instructions, we were indeed able to blank the password on the machine. After removing the disks and rebooting, we pressed Enter on the login screen with trepidation. It worked!

The Toughbook is now accessible! Mind you, it's not the most usable machine we've had, as it's a Mark 1 with only a Pentium MMX 266 processor, 128MB RAM, and a whopping 4 GB (yes, that's f-o-u-r) hard drive, most of which is carrying the OS. But Lisa is happy with it.

Now she wants a CD-ROM drive for the thing. Unfortunately, it's a highly proprietary type of drive, so replacements are in the >$100 range.

Comments

[n5red.livejournal.com]

I am very fond of my Asus Eee PC. It's not a rugged as a Toughbook, but it's significantly faster and can be upgraded to 2GB of RAM. A very nice little $400 notebook.

[thirdworld.livejournal.com]

$100? You can get a second-hand much better laptop for $300 or so. Is it worth upgrading at all?

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

Ah, but can you get a second-hand much better laptop that has a mil-spec hardened case and can survive being dropped several meters without much more than scratching the case? That's the key thing here. Toughbooks are tough, and might manage to survive the rigors Lisa puts equipment through.

[thirdworld.livejournal.com]

Fair enough. I could still suggest a 1 gig (or more) flash card, or two, instead of a cd drive. They have more storage and are cheaper and easier to use, and cds can still be burned on another computer if needed.

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

Yes, but as far as we've found, if you are playing a game that says, "Put the CD in the drive," it doesn't do any good to have the files from that CD on a flash drive. That's probably the main reason she wants this -- to be able to play certain games on the machine.

[miramon.livejournal.com]

USB CD-ROM drive?

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

We would probably have done that had internal drives not been available (albeit at about $115 including shipping for a CD/DVD-RW drive). One bottleneck is that the machine has the older USB 1.0 interface, so it's slow. Yes, you can put a PC card in with USB 2.0, but Lisa hates that, because she feels the USB connector sticking out of the card is terribly fragile and has too much lever action. What she wants is a PC Card extension -- something that would plug into the PC card slot and run a short ribbon cable to another PC Card connection. That way you could connect the PC card items that have things sticking out of them (USB connectors, ethernet plugs, etc.) without worrying that a minor bump will snap the card slot. And given the way she treats her computers, this is not a trivial concern.

[redneckotaku.livejournal.com]

I eventually want to get a Laptop, but I want it cheap. The trouble is that I want a newer model and they are $300 plus on EBay. I wouldn't use the Laptop that often is another issue I would have, also.

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

Well, my two laptops (Inspiron 600m) are desktop replacements for me. When at home, I plug them into a docking station. Lisa doesn't object to desktop machines, but she detests mouses and will only use touchpads for pointing devices. There aren't many desktop keyboard with built-in touchpads, and the only ones we've seen are made in China, and therefore Lisa won't touch them. She's content with machines a few years old, as most of the games she wants to play will still run on the IBM T30, for instance.

[msconduct.livejournal.com]

Isn't the T30 made in China? (Not sure about the Toughbook - it may depend on its age.)

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

The T30s were made in both Mexico and China. Lisa won't use the Chinese-built ones and insists on Mexican-made ones. In fact, we special-ordered a couple of Mexican-made T30s from one online vendor who insisted that they had them. When the boxes arrived, Lisa opened them up and found they were Chinese. The vendor had simply taken the next two off the stack. We sent them back, and because she was so annoyed with their quality control, demanded a full refund rather than a replacement. (She hates having to buy computer equipment by mail order, but it seems almost impossible to do otherwise these days. She wants to look at stuff and handle it. We've spent a lot of money on return shipping.)

This Toughbook was made, it appears, in Korea. It's mil-spec, apparently, but not actually made for the military. I think Lisa would really like to get one of the rare made-in-America boxes. There must be some out there, if only to meet military manufacturing requirements; however, that's one reason they're likely to be hideously expensive.

[msconduct.livejournal.com]

I think some of the Toughbooks were also made in Japan, but that may not still be the case.

This will hardly be news to you, but sourcing non-Chinese computer equipment is getting more difficult by the day. I'm not sure if boxes assembled elsewhere are Chinese component-free, either.