Tough Penguins !!!!

[Abarbarian]

To treat meeself to a reward for giving up smoking for the last five weeks I bought one of these,

https://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2198833,00.asp

 

[muckshifter]

... and it only took 5 weeks to 'afford' something that shouldn't go up in smoke.

 

[nivrip]

You taking it mountaineering or potholing?

And just think what you will be able to "afford" after quitting for a year.

 

[Taffycat]

Well done for giving-up the smokes @Abarbarian - that looks like a super nice notebook. Hope you get loads of enjoyment using it.

 

[Becky]

Good work, that's certainly a very good decision! Keep it up, we're rooting for you

 

[Abarbarian]

Took my 52 out with me the last two days and so far have watched five episodes of Captain Harlock whilst waiting for my passengers.

 

[Abarbarian]

Well I just spent half an hour writing up new information in this thread and it all just disappeared. Why I have no idea so I am filling in with a post from elsewhere.

The reason I have become interested in Toughbooks is down to my sister. She does a lot of fancy cooking and needs to have a copy of the recipe to hand. She was concerned at how much paper she was wasting and the cost and how paper sheets do not get along well with sticky hands and surfaces.
I suggested she use her Kobo Arc tablet but she said she had tried it but the text was too small and making the text bigger and scrolling with sticky hands was not do-able. Also she was concerned with knocking/dropping the Kobo in a kitchen.
I remembered the small CF-19 Toughbook with the swivel screen and rugged use anywhere construction and told my sister about them. After taking a look at one on-line she asked me if I could find her a reasonably priced CF-19. It was whilst looking for one that I bought the 52.
Back to the CF-19 story.......... I did indeed find one. One that was sold as faulty with missing parts. Looking at the sale pictures I noticed that there did not seem to be a bios password set. That is an important fact as Toughbooks with set bios passwords are only useful for parts or as door stops. Reading around it seems that hacking a Toughbook bios password is not possible for mere mortals.
I made my bid and won the auction and paid the handsome sum of £42 inc postage. Now this delightful beast was missing a hdd caddy, a hdd, a ram cover, a charger and a key "AltGr". You may wonder why I bought the poor old thing ?
The beast arrived a few days later.
After unwrapping and plugging in I thought the charger I had bought for the 52 would work on the 19 and it did, so that was one good point. Ah ha I could change the boot order in the bios and save the changes, my instincts were right, another good point. Plugging in a usb a Live MX-17 fired up and ran pretty neatly, another good point. The onboard wireless worked straight away, another good point. However FireFox which did open smartly, locked up the poor old beast to such an extent that hitting the power button was the only option, not such a good point. This point did not bother me as I had an idea that the 2 GB ram I had on order for the 52, whilst being faster ram should work ok in the 19.
Anyways here is a shot of the 19 beast before any work had been done to it. I am well chuffed that the beast appears to be almost fully functional despite the missing parts.

That is a shot from a few days ago and the wi-fi is showing down. I am actually posting from the 19 now. Posting is slow as I have yet to fully master the strange keyboard.

The tale will continue.

Oh an I still am on the no smoking wagon

 

[Becky]

Oh an I still am on the no smoking wagon

Glad to hear it! are you feeling the benefits of not smoking? My brother smoked for years and when he gave it up he was amazed at how much more he could do at the gym.

 

[Abarbarian]

Glad to hear it! are you feeling the benefits of not smoking? My brother smoked for years and when he gave it up he was amazed at how much more he could do at the gym.

Nope ain't feeling any benefits at all. I felt rough for a few weeks after stopping, as expected. Since then I have felt worse and worse. Been to the doc's twice and the meds they gave me made me feel worse and did not alleviate anything.
When I say doc's that ain't quite true as they were practice nurses. Getting to see a doc here is like winning the lottery.
I went down today and stood in line in the cold and wet at 8 o'clock and when I finally made it to the receptionist there were no more doc appointments. Boy did they look surprised when I asked for a complaint form. Boy will they be surprised now that they have made me angry enough to do something about the dreadful state of the local health care. There will be tears and teeth gnashing and weeping and wailing and there will be changes made.

 

[Becky]

Sorry to hear that When my dad gave up smoking he coughed so much he gave himself a double hernia! He reckons his body was trying to get rid of all the stuff on his lungs.

Can you not make a doctors appointment in advance? At our clinic the on-the-day appointments are reserved for urgent stuff but you can always book an appointment in advance if it's not urgent.

 

[bootneck02]

Well here I am writing on the Penguin Page, well I never, things have changed for me. Firstly I must say I was a Microsoft user from XP through to Windows 10 until the latter part of December 2015, then the shock that Microsoft war monitoring my PC usage and was virtually spying on me, I was shocked I had trusted Microsoft, I had built my PC, I had paid Microsoft for my Operating System, but I hadn’t only the licence to use it. I was furious and disgusted that Microsoft had done this to its customers, so a quick Google for alternatives.
Yes I found it LINUX but so many versions it was a bit confusing Hundreds of the darn things but after investigating found two that looked like a good start for a Microsoft refugee Ubuntu and Linux Mint Cinnamon both 64 bit. The next thing was to download and rip both disto's and then burn them onto CD's.
The first one I tried was Ubuntu, it was OK and could cope with it and it is fairly easy to use for a complete novice and I ran it for a couple of days. Then I tried Linux Mint Cinnamon 17.1, Oh how refreshing so easy to use this elderly old idiot can use it, it has hundreds of applications which could be actuated and and I loved it, I ran it until Cinnamon.18 came out and that was even better now running 18.3 64bit so user friendly and great on line support. Will I ever go back to Microsoft "will hell ever freeze over" NO NOT EVER".
Should you want to try it you can down load it and burn to a CD or Memory Stick and run it from there without deleting Windows from your hard drive so if you don't like it or just want to have a look at something different and play with it you may be surprised like I was how great it is and it is free.
The other advantages are it costs you nothing, it is so much lighter than Windows and therefore works much quicker, and great online support. The only disadvantage if you are a gamer there is not as much verity of games on Steam as for Windows but there still a good choice there.
I am now using Linux Mint Cinnamon 18.3 and looking forward to the release Cinnamon 19 which will be released May/June this year.

LONG LIVE LINUX, you have a choice.

Bootneck

 

[Abarbarian]

Just a quick update on me sisters Tough-Book CF-19.

After a few parts replacements and some extra memory and a quick polish and clean I delivered the Tough-Book to me sister way back in the spring.
I installed MX-17 for her and also added all of the free games that I could find that would be suitable for a four to five year old. Not that I think my sister has the mind of a five year old, though I do at times, the games were for her granddaughter who she looks after regularly.
It seemed a shame to let the Tough-Book sit on a shelf and only have occasional use when it could be used by my grandniece. It has a lot going for it, if you can drive a truck over them then any abuse a child can inflict on one will be like water of a ducks back.

Seems that some of the games were very well received and regularly played with. Favorites being Tux Racer, Tux Typing and TuxMath, along with some pelmanism game whose name I forget.

Any ways the reason I am posting this update is that sis visited me a couple of weeks ago and brought the CF-19 with her. As she had a few Q's about running some programs etc etc.
I gave her a few pointers about Zim and Calibre and showed her a few helpful penguin tricks. Both her and the grand niece have found using MX-17 easy and a pleasure to use.
As the CF-19 had not been updated in the last seven or eight months I was not surprised that there were a couple of hundred program updates almost one gig of data to be installed. Just a trifle nervously I hit the enter button and sat back to see if the update would be successful. As I have medium fiber here the downloads did not take more than five minutes and the installs took around another five to ten minutes. As there were a large number of updates I did a reboot just to settle everything in place, it is good practice to reboot after a kernel update though not strictly needed.
Well by gum the CF-19 rebooted just fine and dandy and normal operation was resumed. I'd like to see a W 10 rig do eight months of updates downloaded and installed in less than twenty minutes and just the one reboot.
I guess millions of W 10 users would too