Panasonic ToughBook CF-U1

[Mike Peter Reed]

Now if only it ran Leopard with Boom Recorder and could be hooked up to some decent pre-amps and a Hawkswood battery system ...

http://www.trustedreviews.com/notebooks/review/2008/07/09/Panasonic...

[Jeffrey S. Wexler]

The ToughBook does look pretty terrific but the fatal flaw is that it runs on the wrong operating system. Why isn't there Boot Camp for Windows --- we could boot a Windows device like this with Mac OS X and never look back.

- Jeff Wexler

[Marc Wielage]

BTW, just to play devil's advocate, I just got roped into buying another Windows system (don't ask), which came with Windows Vista. So far, I don't hate it as much as I thought I would. It's annoying, but only about 75% as annoying as XP. It's -- dare I say -- a lot more Mac-like than I had hoped.

All of these operating systems are just a means to an end. All I really care about is what I'm trying to do with the computer, and how much the operating system gets in the way. Still, I have to admit, OSX does that better than anything else -- for me. But it still needs a lot of improvement.

For example, Spaces (aka multiple desktops) are still really buggy, even under 10.5.6. Once in awhile, pieces of programs get flung off my screen and it's hard to get them back. On the other hand, Vista is worse. I suspect Windows 7 is gonna be a whole lot better. One thing about Microsoft -- those guys are very crafty, and they definitely learn from their mistakes.

[Thomas Popp]

Jeff, the main reason for this is due to hardware and the MAC OSX operation system. Apple keeps it's computers, hardware, and software proprietary so there are no issues with third party software crashing on you due to inefficient testing.

In order to have a piece of software or hardware sold with a "MAC OSX" sticker on it, it has to go through complete testing to make sure that it won't conflict with the software or hardware of the computers in anyway.

On the PC side of things, computer manufacturers have free reign to make any type of hardware or software that is Windows based, without any "big brother" regulation on Microsoft's end. They create their software or hardware piece, but don't have to go through extreme testing on other hardware peripherals and software that may conflict with their product to make sure it doesn't crash a user's system.

I believe that putting MAC OSX on a PC (even if it is being emulated in boot camp or a parallels type program) would be a setup for disaster!

Thoughts?

~Thomas Popp

Happy Holidays!
Jeffrey S. Wexler said:

The ToughBook does look pretty terrific but the fatal flaw is that it runs on the wrong operating system. Why isn't there Boot Camp for Windows --- we could boot a Windows device like this with Mac OS X and never look back.

- Jeff Wexler

[Martin Harrington]

Look at www.hackintosh.org or www.insanelymac.com you'll see that it does run osx.