Intel

Over the past year or so I’ve come to realise that although my Surface Pro 3 (i5/4GB/128GB) is an awesome machine I just don’t take it out of the house as much as I should be for fear of breaking it. On that note I’ve decided to sell it and in turn replace it with a true beast of the computing world – a Panasonic Toughpad FZ-G1 (link to Panasonic product page).

The astute of you will probably realise that bought new that is a very expensive bit of kit and such I’ve opted for (what I believe to be) a refurbished 1st generation model from Fully Rugged.

Hardware Specification

  • Intel i5-3437U Dual Core @ 1.9ghz (details on the Intel website)
  • 4GB RAM DDR3 RAM @ 1,333mhz
  • 128GB SSD
  • USB 3.0 Port
  • HDMI Port
  • Ethernet Port (see the photos below!)
  • Front and Rear Cameras
  • N class WiFi
  • Active Digitiser Pen and Capacitive Touch Screen
  • LTE Mobile Data Connectivity (WWAN)
  • 1.8m drop safe (please don’t test this!)
  • IP65 compliant (see link for more details on what this means)
  • 1.1kg in weight (yep that’s heavy compared to your iPad Air Gen 88 and no I don’t care! :))

Initial Thoughts

Thus far I am very impressed; the build quality is excellent, I may not feel tempted to drop it from 1.8m to test the specification however I’ve been out in the rain with the tablet and are it didn’t show any issues at all. Having access to a WWAN connection against using the mobile hotspot on my phone is very liberating and Windows 10 will manage connecting to the mobile network for you whenever you are away from WiFi. I haven’t done any real work on battery life as yet however I’ve used it on and off over the course of an 8 hour day and battery life didn’t drop into my head once as something to be concerned by. Resume from standby is as fast as my Surface ever was and performance running web browsing/document editing/playing UWP games is top notch (don’t expect to be gaming on it though).

Over all I am very impressed!

Gallery

Have been having a bit of an interesting issue over the past few weeks whereby our Hyper-V Hosts (Dell T430 Tower Servers) would loose network connectivity at seemingly random intervals; the only resolution was to restart the server or to remove and replace the network cable.

After much investigation looking at the servers and associated network switch we discovered that only the Virtual Switches attached to the on board Broadcom NetXtreme adapters were having issues and that the Intel PCI card NICs were not.

That soon lead onto Microsoft KB 2986895 which relieved a known bug in the drivers for the Broadcom adapters that messed up the Virtual Machine Queues (VMQ) feature of Hyper-V causing a loss in network connectivity. The fix is either to update the driver to a version that does not have the issue or to disable VMQ.

More details can be found in this Microsoft KB… https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/2986895

Before I go much further into this article I will say – there is no one answer to how much power does a PC consume. You have to take into consideration the internal components (particularly the CPU and if the PC uses a HDD or SSD), the age of the PC, the efficacy of its PSU and also how far its components are pushed.

The simplest way to determine how much power your PC uses is to buy yourself a relatively cheap power meter like this one on Amazon which I got for a little under £10.

All the same the video below shows a selection of the various types of PCs I have to hand and how much they consume, a further write up is over the page.

 

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