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

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.

Free Music on the Panasonic CF-F8 with Spotify

I've just discovered spotify as an alternative to Itunes.

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.

How to watch Live BBC channels on the web

The BBC have recently started streaming all of it's channels over the Internet.

The service is still in Beta but looks to work ok.

To Watch BBC 1 Click here
To Watch BBC 2 Click here
To Watch BBC 3 Click here
To Watch BBC 4 Click here
To Watch BBC News Click here
To Watch CBBC Click here
To Watch CBeebies Click here

Keep Up to date with the latest BBC news delivered to your desktop

For those news junkies amongst you, myself included ;-)
I've been looking at ways to get news headlines devivered straight to the desktop.

My favourite 2 methods are from the BBC.

The first is through the BBC live stream of the BBC News Channel.

To start viewing the stream goto this link.
This will start streaming the BBC news channel in your browser.
To make things a little more streamline you can click on this icon which will open the stream in its own windowYou can then resize the window to your own tastes.


My second method is more descrete and needs less bandwidth - the BBC News ticker.
The news ticker can be downloaded from this page.
It's a utility that runs across the top of the Windows desktop and displays the latest BBC headlines (Tailored to your taste) which can be clicked on to show the full story, you can also set the utility to notify you with breaking news. This utility only uses a small amount of the screen but is a good way of keeping you in the loop

By putting these two utilites together you have all the news you could ever wish for.

Videos of QuakeLive running on the Panasonic CF-F8

In this post I wrote about testing QuakeLive on the Panasonic F8 Toughbook.

In ran well so I thought I would record a couple of videos of it running and post them here.
As you see it runs very well.

Testing QuakeLive on the Panasonic CF-F8

QuakeLive is a recent and highly popular release on the Web. It's an impressive free browser based implementation of the classic PC game Quake 3 Arena that runs through FireFox and IE.

The Panasonic CF-F8 Toughbook is not a laptop aimed at gaming and traditionally Browser Games require a higher spec then native games so I was currious to see how well it ran on the F8.

The answer is very well. The game runs at full speed with a high frame rate, it runs in a browser window so isn't full screen but on the Screen of the F8 it's plenty large enough.

The controls use the Glide pad so I've found it a bit tricky to play but a USB mouse would solve the problem, I'm also going to look at re-defining the keys later on, and I'll report back here how it goes.

A Video of Tiger Woods 08 running on the Panasonic CF-F8

In this Post, I talked about how the Touch Pad of the Panasonic F8 wasn't well suited to the default control system, but how the alternative control systems worked very well.

I thought I would post a video of how well the F8 handles the game with a few of the detail levels turned down.

As you can see it works pretty well, and it's a very enjoyable game, and a great way to pass a train journey ;-)

My thoughts on the Panasonic RP-HT225 headphones

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.

Problems playing Tiger Woods 08 on the Panasonic F8

I thought it might be useful to have a good golf game on my Laptop for long car journeys.

So I purchased Tiger Woods 08 as it's now available for a very good price.

The main problem when playing on the F8 is that the control system is designed to simulate a golf swing by dragging a mouse. It's a good idea in theory but just doesn't work to well on the Touch pad on the F8. It makes the game almost unplayable.

I've found a solution, there are several other control systems included in the game but to access them you need to create your own golfer and associated Profile.
When you have created your own golfer you are able to select a different control method the 2 & 3 click control methods work very well on the F8.

Unboxing of a Pair of Panasonic RP-HT225 headphones

Picture 1 above shows the RP-HT225 in rather nice packaging.

Picture 2 above shows the contents of the box.
a few things to notice:

• A Mini-jack to jack adapter is included.
• The headphones are large and do a good job of shielding the noise and stopping other people being able to hear the music.
• The long cable which has a volume control built in to it.
  

Improving the Audio Output of the Panasonic CF-F8

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.

Storing and watching DVD's on the Panasonic CF-F8

I've been investigating the best way (for me anyway) to store and Play un-encrypted DVD's on the Panasonic F8 Toughbook.

I've tried a few ways of copying Videos from DVD to disk, most involving long re-encoding processes but the best for me is to just copy the Video_TS folder from the DVD across the the Hard disk in it's entirety.

You can then right click on the Video_TS folder of the Hard Disk and choose Play in VLC Media Player.

VLC Player will now play the video as if it was a DVD Disc.

Adding Extra Storage to the Panasonic CF-F8

Some of you have notice that in this post it mentions how much storage space my F8 has.

It lists a D: partition that has 466 GB available, this is actually an External USB Maxtor Hard drive.

I've previously had problems where a laptop has failed and I've been left struggling the data on it's Hard Drive, so to try and avoid the problem in the future, I'm using an external drive to hold all my music, photos, films and home movies, that way should my Panasonic ever fail then my important data is safe.

The drive is actually becoming the centre of my media centre facilitated by the Panasonic F8, and 2 work very well together.

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

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.

A Video of MAME running on the Panasonic F8

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.

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

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.

Slight Problem with quick scrolling on the Panasonic F8

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.

Playing FreeCiv on the Panasonic F8

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.

Installing MAME on Windows Vista

MAME is a very popular arcade emulator which has been in development for many years and is regularly updated to support new games.

There are several different versions of MAME but I'm going to be using a version of MAME32 which has a Windows front end....traditionally MAME is a command line application.

I'm downloading MAME32 from Here.

After it's downloaded run the file and it will extract to a folder of your choice.

MAME needs Roms to use and a number have been made legally available from here.

Download a rom and put it into the roms directory, you don't need to unzip it.

Run Mame32 and the application will load.

As default MAME32 shows all the games that it supports which makes finding the roms that you have a little tricky.

By clicking on Available towards the top of the left hand tree the view will change to show just the Roms that you have available.

Double click on the game that you want to play and it will start.

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

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

Useful Media Applications for the Panasonic F8 Part 1

One of my goals is to use the Panasonic F8 as a complete home entertainment PC, and to use it to store all my media.

At this stage I thought it would be useful to start to list the media applications that I'm using on the Panasonic F8.

Music Library

I'm a big fan of Apple and I love my Ipod Touch, so for me the ideal application is ITunes. ITunes has come a long way recently and the interface is pretty good now. The Integration with the ITunes Store is brilliant and if there is a song, album, video, film or Tv show that you want to see there is a very good chance that the ITunes Store has it available to buy at a very reasonable price.
On previous laptops I've owned Itunes has been a bit laggy - especially at playing videos, but on the F8 so far it's been great.

Video Player


In the future I plan to investigate using Itunes as a complete media centre but for now I wanted a video player that could play lots of video formats, was free, has good performance and has a small footprint.
The Answer for me VLC Player, it's very quick, easy to use and plays all sorts of video files.



TV Player

I've got a Sling Box on my LAN so I use Sling Player to watch and control my TV from any Internet Connection. It works great on the F8.

Panasonic F8 Toughbook Windows experience Index

Microsoft have provided a utility within Windows Vista to rate the performance of your PC.
It's called the Windows experience Index.
It rates various aspects of your computer (Graphics, processor speed etc) and creates a score to judge system performace.

Here's how the Panasonic CF-F8 Toughbook performs on the Windows experience Index.

Processor : 5.2
RAM : 5.7
Graphics: 3.2
Gaming Graphics: 3.6
Primary Hard Disk: 5.4

Overall: 3.2

Other information:

System
Manufacturer Panasonic Corporation Model CF-F8EWDZFAE Total amount of system memory 3.00 GB RAM System type 32-bit operating system Number of processor cores 2 64-bit capable Yes

Storage
Total size of hard disk(s) 613 GB Disk partition (C:) 98 GB Free (147 GB Total) Disk partition (D:) 420 GB Free (466 GB Total)

Graphics
Display adapter type Mobile Intel(R) 4 Series Express Chipset Family Total available graphics memory 1301 MB Dedicated graphics memory 64 MB Dedicated system memory 64 MB Shared system memory 1173 MB Display adapter driver version 7.15.10.1554 Primary monitor resolution 1280x800 DirectX version DirectX 10

Problem with opening the lid of the Panasonic F8

There is a slight awkwardness with opening the lid of the Panasonic F8 toughbook, the carrying handle makes it difficult to press the button which releases the catch. The problem is solved by opening out the handle, but I can't help thinking that this is a bit of a design flaw.

Image 1 below shows how close the carrying handle is to the button open open the case lid

Image 2 below shows how difficult it is to press the button when the handle is closed.

Image 3 below shows that opening the handle resolves the issue.

Protecting the Panasonic CF-F8 Toughbook

Having been caught out by virus's and Malware in the past, I was keen to protect my F8 right from the start.

Here are the steps I took, and the applications I installed to keep the Toughbook safe:

Internet Browser: Firefox Version 3

Given the recent security alterts around Internet Explorer I quickly changed the browser on the F8 to FireFox Version 3. Firefox includes strict anti-phishing and anti-malware measures and has an open source process to include new security updates.

More information on the security facilities in Firefox can be found here.

Firewall: Windows Firewall

What's a firewall? (from Wiki)
A firewall is an integrated collection of security measures designed to prevent unauthorized electronic access to a networked computer system. It is also a device or set of devices configured to permit, deny, encrypt, decrypt, or proxy all computer traffic between different security domains based upon a set of rules and other criteria.

Windows Firewall is the standard firewall that comes free with Windows Vista (and Windows XP).

How to check that Windows Firewall is activated.
Click on the Start Button.

1. Click on Control Panel
2. Click on Security
3. Click on Turn Windows Firewall On or Off
4. Make sure that the firewall is turned on.
5. If you need to change the firewall settings then click on Change settings.
6. Make any changes and click OK
   

Anti Virus Software: Avast!
Avast! is a free (for home users) anti virus software, downloadable from http://www.avast.com/eng/download.html

Avast! is aimed at preventing several types of computer threats, including those that are not technically computer viruses such as spyware and even rogue anti-spyware, and can also make a virus Recovery DataBase which is used to recover files when they are infected (instead of deleting them). The program is available with text and voice translations for 27 languages.

Script Protection: NoScript
Many websites contain scripts, often these are harmless and need to be run, but sometimes these scripts are malicious and install malware on your computer. NoScript gives the choice back to you of if you want a site to be able to run scripts or not. No script will be able to run unless you give it permission to do so, this might sound like a pain but you can set NoScript to always allow scripts from your favourite page...so you can forget about it after you have set it once for your page.


I hope that these steps will be enough to protect my F8 but I'm always looking for further methods of protection.

Panasonic CF-F8 Toughbook Benchmark Tests

Here are the results for the F8 from PCMark and 3DMark Benchmark applications.

Keep in mind that the comparisons shown are against the fastest PC in PCMark's database, the results shown are impressive, especially for a Laptop aimed at corporate users.

PC Mark:

• 4714 PCMarks

3DMark:

• 1365 3DMarks

• 7679 CPUMarks
  

Panasonic CF-F8 Toughbook Specifications

Here are the full Specifications for the CF-F8:

Processor: Intel Core2 Duo CPU P9300 @ 2.26GHz
Processor clock: 2261 MHz
Motherboard model: CFF8W-1
RAM: 3GB
Graphics card: 128MB Intel GMA X4500MHD
Hard Drive: 147Gb
Display: 14.1 inch, 16:10, 1280x800 pixels

Panasonic F8 - How to Boot from CD\DVD

This morning I had my first issue with the Panasonic F8 Toughbook.

Problem: The Toughbook came with Windows XP installed and as I prefer Windows XP I thought I would run the Windows Vista recovery disk.
I changed the boot order to boot from DVD first but the F8 still booted from the hard drive, even with the restore disk in the drive.

This is because as default the DVD is set to be manually turned on when required to save battery life.

The solution isn't obvious although to be fair it is stated very clearly in the manual - it's just that most of us don't read manuals ;-).

Solution: As well as changing the boot order you need to make sure that the DVD drive is set to power up on switch on.
To check this:
Press F2 on power on to enter the BIOS settings.
In the Main Tab make sure that Optical Drive Power option is set to on.

This will activate the DVD drive as soon as the Toughbook is turned on, and the DVD will now be allowed to boot ahead of the Hard Disk Drive.

Panasonic F8 Unboxing

Pictured below is a detailed unboxing of the Panasonic CF-F8 Toughbook.

The Box and inside

The Box itself is simple and plain with no colour images, remaining functional rather than aesthetic, stating not much more then the Brand, Model & serial numbers.
The box is aimed at Corporate users, I would suspect that a consumer model packaging would be more better presented and of a better build quality.

Picture 1 above shows the Front of the box


Picture 2 shows the top of the box with useful carrying handle


Picture 3 above shows the front and side of the box.

Picture 4 above shows the well packaged and snug contents of the box

Picture 5 above shows the Laptop and accessory's box once removed from the main packaging.

The Contents.
The following pictures show what comes in the Box

Picture 6 above shows the Panasonic CF-F8 Toughbook by itself


Picture 7 above shows the F8 with the case open.


Picture 8 above shows the Toughbook, Cables, the battery and the 3 included cd's.

Picture 9 above shows the included manuals and 3 disks. The disks are the Windows Xp recovery disk, the Windows Vista recovery Disk & the 3G Modem setup disk.


Picture 10 above shows the F8 with the unpackaged power supply

Fitting the Battery

Picture 11 above shows the underside of the F8 without a battery fitted.

Picture 12 above shows a close up of the battery

Picture 13 above shows the F8 next to the battery - ready for fitting.

Picture 14 shows the F8 with fitted battery.

The Panasonic CF-F8's Case and ports.


Picture 15 above shows the F8 ready to go.

Picture 16 above shows the F8 with it's carrying handle extended.

Picture 17 above showing the front left of the case with (from left to right) the Power switch, the Wireless on\off switch, the 2 LEDs are to show when ECO mode is active and the battery indicator.

Picture 18 above shows the front right of the case, with the DVD power\eject switch.

Picture 19 above shows the right hand side of the F8 , with (from left to right) 3 USB ports, the VGA port, the Ethernet port and MODEM port.

Picture 20 above shows the rear of the F8.

Picture 21 above shows the Left hand side of the F8, showing (from left to right) the Power socket, the port replicator port, the heat expulsion grate, 2 audio ports, SD memory card reader, and PCMCIA socket.

The F8 has plenty of expansion potential.

Picture 22 above shows the front of the top of the opened F8.
Picture 23 shows the left hand side of the top of the powered up F8, showing the lit Power Switch\LED and the battery indicator.

Picture 24 above shows the touch pad and mouse buttons of the F8

The DVD drive on the Panasonic Cf-F8

Picture 25 above shows the closed DVD drive which is located on the right hand side of the case.


Picture 26 above shows the open DVD drive on the F8.


Picture 26 above shows the open DVD drive with a loaded disk.

Welcome to my Panasonic F8 Experience

Welcome to my Panasonic F8 Blog.

About 3 months ago my existing laptop went up in smoke - yup real smoke - and as our household PC is ready to be replaced I thought it would be a good idea to replace them both with one portable unit.

My criteria for selection was that the unit:

• Must be Portable
• Be powerful enough to be used as a complete Media & Entertainment Centre.
• Have plenty of storage space.
  
• Have a clear readable screen.
• Have a good keyboard
• Be able to connect to my work network through SSL
• Be fairly rugged as it will get moved around.

Having some experience of the Panasonic Toughbook range I knew that they were likely candidates so I've got a Panasonic Cf-F8 Toughbook.

This blog will describe my experience with the Toughbook, from setup through to completion and beyond.

I hope you find it Useful.