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
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.
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. 
