Getting a Panasonic CF-M34 Toughbook Up and Running (In Burnaby)

My first laptop fixing is a CF-M34 which is more than 10 years old. It is a mini-laptop with touch screen capability which is very rare. Its laptop body is made of the strongest metal to stand for toughest environment. It has a story in internet that a CF-M34 Toughbook saved a life when it took a bullet for a United States soldier in Iraq. 

I bought one at $99 from eBay which said that it has no hard drive. It was shipped from Alberta. When I received and opened it up, it did not have hard disk caddy and the connection cable as well. I have to pay $34 to buy the caddy and connection cable in eBay in addition to a 30G hard drive.

The challenge of this laptop is that it does not have CD ROM nor diskette to load the operating systems. The trick is to format the hard drive in another computer to a boot-able DOS partition and have another Windows XP partition to hold the I386 folder before putting it into the CF-M34. When the CF-M34 is booted up from DOS, I can run the XP installation program and install the Windows XP OS.

Although the memory is 256M and the CPU is 300 MHz, the performance is still pretty good and the touch screen with driver downloaded from Panasonic Canada website works nice.

I added an external wireless card to it and found a user for it. It has a new home in Burnaby.