Panasonic CF-29

I got a hold of a great laptop which I didn’t knew much about since.

A friend of mine asked me if I can do some overhauls on his laptop, thus, I came to pick up this unknowingly heavy laptop which I should say is REALLY heavy. I didn’t bother much to look what’s inside after I picked up the package, until I got home and started opening the bag and I saw this thick, heavy looking thing inside.

Too bad, I didn’t took pictures of it personally, I just grabbed these off from google.

I’ve got to say, this Panasonic CF-29 “Toughbook” is really one heavy duty laptop, just by starring at it makes me wonder why didn’t I knew the existence of Toughbooks coming from Panasonic, well anyway, these bulky guy has its great features to note. One thing I really liked about this book is that you can remove the drives easily without the screws in. They’re locked tight (rubber seals over the opening), with just a sideway push over a ledge, then goes “pop” out, you can easily change between different hard drives. I tried tinkering with the CD/DVD-ROM drive, the drive itself is cased in to fit inside the book, with a few unwinds over the screws, I was able to replace the in-housed CD/DVD-ROM with a different one, although it never booted up XD. The same goes with the interchangeable hard-drives, though I didn’t remove the drive from the housing, judging the looks of the HDD’s housing, it is made to absorb shock. It runs on Pentium M 1.2Ghz, with around 512MB of memory, 40gig of HDD capacity, One USB 2.0 port (pretty annoying), LAN/Wi-fi, I’ve read that this has a GPS option, but I didn’t explore about it that much. One more thing to note is the battery time, it runs about 6 hrs after a full charge. My friend said that you can even throw this book off without having a major damage at all. I’ve read comments about it, one of em says that they have accidentally spilled coffee over it (the keyboard) and flushed with water at the men’s toilet, came out with no damage at all. Some even threw this guy off many times and still works normally. Well that is not the main purpose of this book, it’s meant to last on harsh conditions wherein most laptops wouldn’t, but if you would purposely throw this off as many times convenient to you, well, it will eventually break down.

 

Now going inside the system, I did some backup and format over the drive. And usually when I do repairs on laptops, I check the CMOS menu, when I looked at the CMOS menu, I found an option to enable touchscreen, I was surprised to see that this toughbook has a touch screen.

Now, I’ve read issues that many people can’t seem to get these feature to work. Some have worked around it but ended up not working properly.

Well, in my case, the first issue was the pointer is always stuck at the right side of the display where ever I touch the screen.

 

Now let’s work with this, installing drivers was kinda tricky at first, since at the website, you’ll see different revisions of the same model. So how do you differentiate the revisions from each other? Looking at the bottom portion of the book, you’ll find two different Serial numbers that is affixed with the “CF-29”. The correct one should be on the sticker, not imprinted directly on the casing. So starting off with the first letter that comes after “CF-29” should give you the specific model revision. For example, the toughbook I worked around has an “H” coming after “CF-29”. looking at the website, the “H” matches the CF-29 H/J (mk3) category. Now, even if you’re not sure if you’ve selected the correct one, inside the driver selection, you’ll still see a couple of the same drivers with different descriptions below. So to be sure over what driver you should get, try looking at the description of the drivers and you’ll see something like this:

CF-29[H/J]3xxxBx
CF-29[H/J]TxxxBx

Now, try to match that given characters to the serial number at the bottom of your toughbook. The one I worked with matches with the CF-29[H/J]3xxxBx wherein “3” and “B” were present at the same position.

 

Now to get around with your touch screen, first off. You don’t know where to install the touch screen drivers? if you’re using the same exact model and revision as I have used, then, download first the Touch screen/Touchpad driver from the driver page on the website. Now, go to the Device manager, under the Mouse and other pointing devices you’ll see a PS/2 compatible mouse installed, update the driver using the driver you have downloaded from the website (touch screen/touchpad driver). That' should get the touch screen working, if it doesn’t work, check the CMOS menu, and enable touch screen option. If it works but not properly (like with mine, it was stuck at the right portion of the display where ever I touch the screen), try installing the hotkeys driver coming from the website. Well, on my experience, after I installed that driver, the touch screen suddenly works perfectly. So where to install this hotkeys driver? in the device manager, you’ll see an “unknown device”, try updating the driver with the hotkeys driver. I hope that should help your problem with the touch screen feature.

Oh btw, when you install drivers, don’t force install the drivers to the devices, just select “update driver” then select “browse for driver” then point the location at the directory of your driver. In this way, you can properly see if the driver you have downloaded is really meant for that device.