Why You Can Trust CNET Panasonic Toughbook CF-W7 review: Panasonic Toughbook CF-W7
The Toughbook CF-W7 isn't bad. It's designed for a specialised niche, and if you're constantly exposed to water we'd say it'd be a good choice. We'd expect more for our money though, and would otherwise be more tempted to pick up a Thinkpad for general ruggedness.
Design and features
Panasonic's Toughbook CF-W7 arrived in our offices clearly having experienced a hard life already. The screen was covered with residue, suggesting it had been subjected to water being sprayed on it (as is the case in Panasonic's demo booths) and the PCMCIA slot was actually crusty, with some sort of crystalline structures having formed along the top on the inside. We were therefore marginally happy that it obliged to boot up when we pressed the on button.
Panasonic Toughbook CF-W7
The Good
The Bad
The Bottom Line
This particular Toughbook is a bag of oddities. It's all silver on both inside and out and seems to be well constructed, however, it doesn't give the impression of being as rigid or strong as Lenovo's Thinkpad line. In terms of design, think "silver lunchbox" and you're partway there. The design apparently allows it to withstand up to 100kg of pressure, just in case someone stands on it. Being tough, we dropped it from a metre too — admittedly onto a carpeted surface, but it still survived.
Heading inside, the circular touchpad is striking. It works reasonably well, but feels a little restrictive and makes scrolling completely impossible. For a while you're left wondering what the large button on the right side of the circle does — until you discover it's not one. Rather, it's part of the lid of the top-loading optical drive, which takes up the entire right-hand side of the wrist rest and can be flipped open by a switch on the front. Getting a disc in requires some navigation, as about one third of the drive is hidden under the keyboard.
The spill-resistant keyboard itself is vertically shorter than it is wide — creating a number of mistypes until you get used to the stretched nature. Something else that doesn't look quite right is the old-school 12.1-inch, 4:3 screen at a resolution of 1024x768. There is, of course, nothing wrong with this — it just looks odd in an age of 16:10 or 16:9 screens.
Ports are reasonably standard, but — interestingly for a rugged notebook — exposed to the elements. Three USB ports are supplied, as is gigabit Ethernet, a 56Kbps modem jack, SD card reader, PCMCIA slot, VGA out and Panasonic's proprietary extension port for things like docks.
An Intel Core 2 Duo U7600 @ 1.2GHz pulls processing duties, complemented by 2GB RAM, a 120GB hard drive and Bluetooth, but disappointingly only 802.11g wireless (not 802.11n) is supported. It's worth noting that architecture makes all the difference — this 1.2GHz dual-core processor played our YouTube HD video test just fine with 75 per cent usage across both cores, whereas a 1.4GHz single core CULV cannot attain smooth playback.
Performance
With its Intel integrated graphics, the CF-W7 was never going to be a heavy graphics performer, and it proved this with a 3DMark06 score of 288. This laptop is likely not going to be purchased with games in mind — the Windows Vista Business licence should be evidence of this. Its PCMark05 score of 2769 was respectable, meaning it's just fine for day-to-day office tasks.
The rather tiny battery in the back had us worried, but the Toughbook did reasonably well. With all power-saving features turned off, screen brightness and volume set to maximum and playing back an Xvid file, it lasted three hours, 19 minutes and six seconds before shutting down.
The Toughbook CF-W7 isn't bad. It's designed for a specialised niche, and if you're constantly exposed to water we'd say it'd be a good choice. We'd expect more for our money though, and would otherwise be more tempted to pick up a Thinkpad for general ruggedness.