{"id":3410,"date":"2008-12-09T08:30:50","date_gmt":"2008-12-09T02:33:51","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2010-05-05T15:37:54","modified_gmt":"2010-05-05T09:37:54","slug":"panasonic-tough","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/panasonic-tough\/","title":{"rendered":"Panasonic Toughbooks"},"content":{"rendered":"

After a while in the desert climate and the occasional clumsy drop, my two HPs were toast. I debated getting another standard laptop and using a Pelican case, but figured it would still suck up dust anytime it wasn’t in the case. Made for military, firefighters, EMTs, shipboard and others who need a laptop to use during adverse conditions, the Toughbook has a magnesium shell which is dust, shock and water resistant. All of the various connectors and ports are covered by dust- and water-resistant doors. There are fully-rugged, thicker field models, semi-rugged and the smaller, lightweight, thin “business” line, each with varying specs and options such as GPS, WIFI, Cellular links and specialized test gear.<\/p>\n

If I had the money I would spring for one of the newer, thinner notebooks<\/a>, but for my purposes, the CF-28 I bought on eBay has been great (I paid just $475 — 10 percent of the list price! — because it was surplus from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police). I work on movie sets a lot and it seems to shrug off all the abuse it goes through. Aside from the climate (Las Vegas) and getting banged around, spilling a beer on the keyboard is the most extreme environmental hazard thus far. I use a plug in module for wifi and bought an internal wifi chip. It also has a touch screen and pen-like stylus, so you don’t need to use the mouse unless you want to.<\/p>\n

I have no experience with any of the rugged laptops made by other companies. However, when I worked at the Army desert warfare training center at Ft. Irwin, the fully-rugged Toughbooks were used extensively by the soldiers in the field. I’ve also talked to a few cops here in Las Vegas who use them and have heard nothing but rave reviews. Plus, I know the company backs up what they sell: a friend of mine with a Toughbook had his motherboard fried after lightning struck near him and they fixed it for free.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Rugged laptops<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"0","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0},"categories":[32],"tags":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3410"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3410"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3410\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3410"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3410"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3410"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}