Panasonic Cf-51 Mark III

[Santilli]

Cost was 89 plus 20 shipping. Add 44 dollars for 2 Gig 5300 ram, dual channel, add an old SSD, from Kingspec, and up and running.

The Kingspec runs at 75 MB/sec in the Mark III vs. less then 50 MB/sec in the Cf-51 1.6 GHZ Penitum M.

Overall, one of the better buys I've made.

Great for under the car seat.

 

[LunarMist]

Good deal, but do you feel the need to run some calculations or work on Powerpoint decks in the car? :scratch:

 

[Santilli]

I' sure I am missing the subtle parts of that remark, LM. Please explain?

I was gambling on this CF-51. It has twice the Passmark scores of the Pentium 1.6 ghz M version, faster memory, faster bus, actually has good speakers, and, an ATI GPU, vs onboard for the M version.

I get to use all my stuff from the M version, hard drives, CD/DVD player, battery, power supply, and, so far, I can't find a thing wrong with it.

After looking at the value between this and a netbook, I'll take this one everytime.;-)

 

[LunarMist]

Perhaps I misunderstand. How is the laptop installed into the vehicle under the seat? Do you have any photos

?

 

[Santilli]

The laptop isn't mounted under the seat. I need something I can pull out, tether to my Nokia Nuron, and load google spread sheet, and enter income and mileage. Also, the Nuron mobile browser sucks, and Opera is barely liveable on the phone, so it's better to us the phone as a modem, and a computer to access the net.

The CF-51 is the office semi-tough, presentation model, and, it's usually about 2000-3000 dollars, as I'm sure you know. They are well made, last forever, and the only problem seems to be they generally don't upgrade the processors fast enough, relying on a streamlining of the OS for speed, and other components as well. It's NOT an i7, but it does what I need.

 

[Santilli]

Quick update:
Bought another caddy, and installed the 'bad' Kingspec 30 gig with 2003 Server on it. It seems to work pretty well with this model CF-51
giving nearly 80 MB/sec speeds, and .02 access, with writes averaging about half those speeds.
Forgot how much I liked 2003 Server. Does it feel that much faster then the 1.6 GHZ Pentium M? Jury is out on that right now. This machine should be twice as fast, has an ATI M52 gpu, and overall
doesn't seem much taxed by anything I've done lately.

Doesn't seem to like .net updates, however.

I'll post benchmarks in a bit.

 

[Santilli]

First big snag. Phone program that allows tethering, Nokia Suite, requres XP SP2

 

[LunarMist]

SP3 does not work? Weird.

 

[Santilli]

Compatibility mode says you need SP2 to install OVI Suite. Not the end of the world. Just switch the drives when going on the road.

 

[Pradeep]

Compatibility mode says you need SP2 to install OVI Suite. Not the end of the world. Just switch the drives when going on the road.

Does the older PC Suite work with your phone? http://europe.nokia.com/support/download-software/nokia-pc-suite

If so, then:

http://discussions.europe.nokia.com...-PC-suite-for-Windows-2003-server/td-p/254825

"troop wrote:
Hi.
It`s simple.
Download latest version of the PC Suite (tested on Nokia_PC_Suite_7_1_18_0_eng_web.exe)
Extract data from this file and manually install all *.msi files. To extract files you may use Universal Extractor http://www.legroom.net/software/uniextract

Extract data from this file and manually install all *.msi files."

 

[Santilli]

Thanks.
Tried it, and seems I need a driver for the phone to be recognized that I don't have.
The XP install seems faster, probably a better hard drive, despite the numbers, and works great for what I need.

2003 is just fun to play with;-)

 

[Santilli]

Took the laptop to my meeting. Used it tethered, from about 6 pm to 8:30pm.
With the Pentium M 1.6 GHz rated at 21w by intel, I went through the entire battery in about 2 hours the meeting before. This one, I recalibrated the battery, and, it used about 29% of the battery, using the SSD and the Penitum Duo T2500 2.0 Ghz, rated at 31W.