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Panasonic Toughbook W2 Review

Posted by michael on from the not-so-tough dept.

Anonymous Howard writes "For those of you who haven't heard about Panasonic's Toughbook W2, this hard to find laptop not only looks awesome but packs a serious punch for its size. Weighing in at 2.8 pounds with a 12.1" screen, this P4-M 900 Centrino based laptop is impressive. The drawback is its max memory support is only 512MB. However I think the laptop is absolutely gorgeous. Does anyone have any experience with one of these? Designtechnica gave it a 7 in their review. I tend to believe that 512MB of ram is a pretty limiting factor however."

2 of 307 comments (clear)

  1. Memory Limit? by westyvw · · Score: 3, Insightful

    512 Megs a limiting factor? Really? On a notebook I would think that would be more the sufficient. Unlike a desktop computer, a notebook is less likely to be left on as long or to be used in a multitasking fashion. Even making movies music seems unlikely.

    I am using a 1 gighz notebook right now with 512 megs or ram. I browse the web, do some music decompression (shn -> wav or vice versa) and cd burning, some light web work, and maybe some office apps.

    I am using Linux and KDE and I am have never even hit 256 megs in use at any time.

  2. The memory isn't the bottleneck. by AntiOrganic · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Face it, you're not going to be rendering in Maya, encoding DVDs to XviD/OGM or editing 60,000x20,000 pixel images in Photoshop on a 900 MHz CPU; Unreal Tournament 2003 isn't going to suck up all that memory running at 12 FPS on the integrated Intel graphics. And given the screen size, your ability to multitask is limited, since only so much will fit at once, so unless you feel like leaving open 70 minimized windows for some reason, that won't be an issue either.

    With some services disabled, Windows XP will run fine on 96 MB of memory and Linux/BSD will do with the same or less depending on your WM du jour. I can't see why this much memory would be needed on a machine designed with productivity and groupware in mind. The default 256MB should be plenty.