Should You Buy an Old Panasonic Toughbook?

hello guys and welcome back to another video today we're going to be taking a look at an old b grade panasonic toughbook that i bought off of ebay now this thing has some problems but hopefully we're going to be able to fix them and i also want to answer the question whether you should actually buy one of these old panasonic toughbooks and are they still usable today anyway let's take a look inside that chunk of bubble wrap we've got a very poor conditioned laptop i wouldn't exactly call this a b grade machine immediately i realized that it's missing the latch and the display is a bit wobbly this laptop has definitely seen a hard life which makes sense as that is what these are designed to endure it honestly seems a bit too light as if something is missing underneath these metal doors are supposed to be the hard disk and battery both of which are missing i accidentally won another auction for a very similar b grade toughbook this one looks like it's actually in much better condition not only that it actually has the hard drive and the battery which are not cheap to purchase individually the latch is also present making it stay closed a whole lot more securely taking a look inside it's far better but it is definitely in desperate need of a clean you could say that about most laptops though the good things don't stop there it actually turns on it's got a third generation core i5 processor four gigabytes of ram a one terabyte hard disk and it's been running for 5 and hours that is 244 days straight the hard disk has been wiped so for now i'll just install linux before i put a solid state drive in as described in the ebay listing several of the keys do not function we'll have to see whether they can be fixed later in the video to test the functionality of the incomplete toughbook i simply moved across the battery and hard disk in this one none of the keys seem to do anything not a single one the screen on these laptops are also incredibly bright sadly i cannot film them at lower brightnesses due to the pulse width modulation this visual trickery means that the screen is cycling the backlight on and off in rapid succession leading to the rolling shutter effect you see on screen now so we've got one laptop with several dead keys and another with the whole keyboard not functioning at all i'm still hoping to create one good working machine out of the two of them the cheaper one was 67 and the complete one cost 105. they both have many useful features such as a touchscreen and the ability to fold up like a tablet there are also watertight covers over the ports and plenty of room for expandability with over 5800 hours of use i can see why this has become pretty dirty so let's give it a clean and try to make a complete working laptop to begin the disassembly i removed the battery which thankfully still holds a decent charge to get access to the internal components a dozen or so screws had to be removed from the base the metal plate has a watertight seal that runs around the entire perimeter of the laptop that's what it looks like on the inside the cpu is passively cooled meaning no air gets in or out during normal operation rubber seals are used pretty much everywhere in an effort to keep out water dust and dirt there's even gps and cellular connectivity you can put your sim card in here because the internals have no airflow it is completely dust free inside there's no real need to take it apart further the processor uses some very good thermal pads and there's nothing left to clean inside the laptop the outside on the other hand has quite a lot that needs work i began by wiping down the outer casing with some eucalyptus oil years of gunk and grime have built up on here a bit of elbow grease is really starting to make a difference all of this dead skin and grime over the battery door leads me to believe they were switching out batteries pretty frequently a bit of isopropyl alcohol did wonders to remove it all the 10.1 inch screen is pretty much perfect i'd say that suggests that it wasn't used as a touchscreen much or at all a toothbrush was very effective at getting into the hard-to-reach places and you can bet there are plenty of them on this laptop i've always wanted to own one of these panasonic toughbooks however most of the time the older ones still command a decent amount of money this particular model incomplete working condition normally goes for around 350 australian dollars actually a bargain considering this retailed for close to five thousand dollars about eight years ago the keyboard was also held down with some pretty strong adhesive clearly they didn't want it to come out it also looks like i may have accidentally detached the backlight from the keyboard not that that matters though and under this water resistant flap we've got the keyboard and backlight connectors while i had this open i went through and gave it a good cleaning notice the foam that surrounds the display cables as they exit the body of the laptop to try and flush out any possible corrosion from the keyboard i bathed it in a shallow bath of isopropyl alcohol i let this sit for about 15 minutes before draining it off i also cleaned under the keycaps of the problem keys we'll have to see whether this had any effect if you remember earlier in the video the keyboard and the other laptop didn't work at all i want to find out why as i may need a spare keyboard for the other laptop so now we can see why this keyboard was not responding to any inputs it simply wasn't plugged in at all but sadly it's actually one of these really cheap replacement keyboards but however it will work in the other laptop so we can at least have a fully functioning one after flushing out the faulty keyboard with isopropyl alcohol as well as taking off the individual keys and getting under the membranes they still didn't work which is kind of disappointing as a proper really good quality replacement keyboard is about 100 australian and that's more than i paid for either one of these units so i think what we're going to have to do is put the cheap replacement keyboard in the good working toughbook and just live with that until i can source a working backlit keyboard the cheap replacement one will work so i'll use it for now i'm also putting in a second stick of ddr3 memory bringing the system total to eight gigabytes the one terabyte hard disk was well protected inside this caddy there's plenty of foam to cushion a drop and what looks to be a fuse with a 115 degree cut off my guess would be it stops the hard disk from running when it detects an extreme amount of heat in place of the original hard disk i'm putting a cheap kingston a400 ssd which will generally make the laptop feel a lot more zippy this can be slid back in and we'll be done i ended up installing windows 10 but what i really want to know is just how durable these panasonic toughbooks are using the one that was in worst condition i thought i would find out i generally wouldn't recommend hosing down your laptop and after letting it dry out in the sun i put the ssd from the other machine in here and it still worked i wonder what i should try next sometimes you may leave your laptop sitting in the driveway well how does one of these fare getting run over surprisingly the hinge is just as solid as before and when powered on it once again still works fine what if you dropped your laptop off a ladder onto concrete again and again and again those are some solid hits against the ground most of the corners are now dented inward which i guess isn't too surprising the hinge hasn't gotten any worse and when powered on it still works these really do live up to the toughbook name what if you're a fan of golf though a hard impact on the bass looks like it did a serious amount of damage we'll do one more for good measure the hard hits have broken through the metal body genting it pretty hard the front panel is also not looking very good trying to power it up results in no signs of life and opening it up i can see that i managed to bend the wi-fi card and the motherboard underneath as a result it no longer works so now that we know it's best not to hit these with an axe what's it like using one if it wasn't obvious it's a thick laptop panasonic does not waste that space there are ports and buttons on every side of this laptop the cheap replacement keyboard experience is not great it's very cramped but it does work the screen is really bright at an impressive 475 nits even in direct sunlight there is next to no glare the bad part is color reproduction is very poor turning this into a very thick tablet is possible using it is also quite fun the low resolution screen means watching video isn't very good though some light gaming was perfectly fine in minecraft it was getting above 50 frames per second this is likely helped by the low resolution of the display the intel hd 4000 graphics also had no trouble playing old-school runescape in cinebench r20 it ended up scoring 579 points this laptop is not designed to be very powerful and it has to make performance sacrifices to be dust and water resistant so using one of these panasonic toughbooks it's honestly been pretty crazy if you're used to thin and light laptops well this probably isn't going to be for you but if you value durability weather sealing and really good viewing in direct sunlight then maybe this is one for you and don't let that 10.1 inch screen for you this thing is pretty big especially when it comes to thickness and overall heft i had a lot of fun messing around with this laptop and i'll probably keep it and take it to a coffee shop in the future and that'll confuse a few people we've probably never seen one of these but in saying that finding spare parts for these are actually pretty expensive because there probably aren't that many of these around but if you do find one of these in complete working condition you're probably going to be paying a few hundred bucks i paid just over 100 for this better better condition one and about 60 bucks for the one that was in much worse condition but anyway i had a lot of fun making this video and i hope you appreciated me trying to destroy the other one of these laptops i it sort of killed me inside doing that anyway if you like this video feel free to leave a like and if you want to see more definitely consider subscribing i'll see you in the next video you

Channel: Psivewri

Views: 274,448

Keywords: psivewri, 4k, eucalyptus, oil, australia, tech, panasonic, toughbook, CF-19, laptop, restoration, cleaning, fixing, durability, test, breaking, smashing, fire, MK6, strong, break, restored, ebay, bargain, notebook, review, testing, 10.1, small, high, quality, intel, drop, dropping, comparison, unboxing

Id: WfFySPE3wdU

Length: 10min 27sec (627 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 28 2020