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Posts Tagged ‘Toughbook’

Free Music with Spotify

Posted by Admin on February 20th, 2010 No Comments

Spotify has an online library of millions of songs which you can listen to, through a windows application.
The best bit is that you can listen to all these songs free of charge, as long as you don’t mind an occasional advert, or you can pay £10 a month for an advert free service.

It works really well if you just want to listen to your favourite songs or discover new music, however, where for me Itunes is a better solution is you can save your music, copy to your Ipod and you own it.

Spotify is a nice product and you can’t go wrong with free music.


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Posted in Music, Technology, streaming media

BBC HD Programs on IPlayer look great on the Panasonic CF-F8

Posted by Admin on February 15th, 2010 No Comments

The BBC have started to publish High Definition TV shows to their IPlayer service through their Web page. You can access their HD section by clicking here


The video quality is great and the programs look fantastic on the great widescreen monitor of the F8, you can either stream the video or if your Broadband connection isn’t up to it you can download the programs to your hard disk for 30 days.

A fantastic service by the BBC and it really works well on the Panasonic CF-F8.



Follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/netbookjohn

Posted in Technology, streaming media

My thoughts on the Panasonic RP-HT225 headphones

Posted by Admin on February 12th, 2010 No Comments

As Mentioned in this post, to improve the experience to listening to music and films on the Panasonic CF-F8, I purchased a pair of Panasonic RP-HT225 headphones for the low price of £10 from Argos.

They took some getting used to, as I’m used to in ear phones and the output on the RP-HT225 is very bassy, but after getting used to them I was impressed. The headphones are very comfortable and with them sitting over the ear you get a nice roomy echo effect, they also shield noise very well, hiding external noise and making sure that you don’t disturb anyone near you.

I’ve used them to listen to my Itunes library and they certainly make music sound very good, much better then the built in Speakers of the Toughbook.

The Panasonic F8 is a business focused laptop and therefore the speakers aren’t designed for multimedia
purposes, and the Panasonic RP-HT225 headphones provide a cost effective way to provide high quality and personal Sound output.


Follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/netbookjohn

Posted in Music, Technology

Improving the Audio Output of the Panasonic CF-F8

Posted by Admin on February 11th, 2010 No Comments

As mentioned in This Post the sound output on the Panasonic CF-F8 Toughbook is a little weak – especially for watching films or listening to Music, so I’ve been looking at ways to improve the sound.

The easiest way to do this (although not suitable for groups) is to use a pair of headphones.

So I’ve purchased a pair of Panasonic RP-HT225 headphones and I’ll report back here how I get on with them.


Follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/netbookjohn

Posted in Music, Technology

Sound through the built in speakers is a little weak on the Panasonic CF-F8

Posted by Admin on February 8th, 2010 2 Comments

Last night we held a murder mystery evening and a major part of evening involved our guests watching a DVD played on the F8.

Even though the room was small the sound from the DVD was not loud enough to be heard by everyone in the room, even though all volume levels were turned up to full level, and in the end I had to set up external speakers.

I know that the F8 is aimed at business users, but sound may be needed to give presentations, and I would prefer if the speakers were a little louder.


Follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/netbookjohn

Posted in Technology

A Video of MAME running on the Panasonic F8

Posted by Admin on February 7th, 2010 No Comments

I’ve recently been testing MAME on the Panasonic CF-F8, to see how well it performs and I’ve been very impressed.
The speed on popular and demanding games is impressive, the sound is well emulated and the input is spot on, and certainly is significantly better then my previous laptops.

Below is a video of how well Street Fighter Alpha 3 runs on MAME – to me it looks absolutely arcade perfect.



Follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/netbookjohn

Posted in Games, Technology

Slight Problem with quick scrolling on the Panasonic F8

Posted by Admin on February 6th, 2010 3 Comments

Panasonic have included a method of quick scrolling on the F8 which in theory is great but there is a slight problem with the way it is implemented.

To scroll up and down through Web pages or documents your can move your finger in a circular fashion clockwise or anti-clockwise on the mouse pad and the page will move up and down accordingly.

However it needs quite a lot of force to keep your finger constantly on the pad to activate it, it works ok for me but my wife struggles due to arthritis to be able to push down long enough for it to work.

I’m now looking for away to make it more sensitive.


Follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/netbookjohn

Posted in Technology

Solving the Quick Scroll Problem on the Panasonic F8 uisng the Tough Pad Utility

Posted by Admin on February 6th, 2010 No Comments

In this post I talked about the problems I (and my wife) were having with the Quick Scroll functionality on the Panasonic Toughbook F8.

Fortunatly linus-lim was able to post a solution in a comment on the post.

Here’s the solution:

  1. Click on the Touch Pad Utility on the task bar to launch the utility.
  2. On the General settings Page set the scroll speed to Fast.
  3. On the Scroll Area Setting’s page set the scroll activiation area to large, like shown below.
  4. Click on Ok

This has sorted our problem and has made the quick scroll function much easier to use for my wife.


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Posted in Technology

Playing FreeCiv on the Panasonic F8

Posted by Admin on February 4th, 2010 No Comments

FreeCiv is a freely distributable version of the famous Civilisation, created by scratch by fans for several different computer operating systems.

As I enjoyed Civ when I was younger I thought I would see how easy it was to installed and how well it performed under Windows Vista on the Panasonic CF-F8

To install FreeCiv:

  1. Download the application from http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/freeciv/Freeciv-2.1.8-win32-gtk2-setup.exe?download
  2. Run the set up application

  3. Agree to the license agreement and keep clicking Next until the option to choose the installation location.
  4. Select where you want to install FreeCiv and start the install.

FreeCiv is now installed.

When run you get the option of which game type you want to play (single player, Network game Etc) and there are various gameplay options to tweek (eg your nation & the number of AI players).
The game plays in a very similar way to the original Civilisation, and plays very well on the Panasonic F8. The graphics are functional rather then beautiful do they do look very clear on the nice screen of the F8.


Follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/netbookjohn

Posted in Games, Technology

How well do games perform on the Panasonic F8, a test using Counter Strike Source

Posted by Admin on February 2nd, 2010 No Comments

I thought it would be useful to see how well the Panasonic F8 performs as a games playing PC.

In this test I thought I would see how well Counter Strike Source operates on the machine. Counter Strike source is distributed over Steam one of the most popular PC first Person shooters of all time, with millions of fans building on line communities in support of the machine.

Counter Strike Source would push a lot of laptops to the limit especially a laptop aimed at the business market, so I thought it a good test. Counter Strike Source come with a built in stress test to test how well your PC will cope with the game.

Performing the stress test gives a result of an average of 43.63 frames per second, which is actually quite respectable and indicates that the game will perform will. Occasionally the video update on sections of the screen is a little delayed, I believe that this is down to the graphics card rather the processing power.

For a laptop aimed at business users – pretty good going


Follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/netbookjohn

Posted in Games, Technology
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