Yesterday I encountered that feared vision known throughout all computerdom, the Blue Screen of Death. I will not be posting blogs as regularly for a few days while I decipher the needs of my "ruggedized" Task Force-issued Panasonic Toughbook CF-29, which is the third I have been through. These are neither rugged nor tough and to be honest, for the amount of money we spent on them, we would have been better off buying three or four cheaper laptops that are not ruggedized and just replacing them when they get banged up.

What is amusing is that my laptop is probably the most well-taken care of thing I own, even more so than my family, my car or my own body. It sits in my office most of the time in its cozy docking station, with a nice year-round temperature of around 68 degrees, soothing music (okay, I'm lying there) and lovingly caressed daily.

Yesterday I was having a router issue and rebooted the computer, only to have it lock up and provide me with a haunting error message about dumping physical memory. Now I'm no novice on a computer, but I'm not a member of the Geek Squad either. But it seems to me that when you purchase something "ruggedized" and "tough", if it isn't jarred, frozen, driven over (I HAVE done that to a Dell laptop, which CONTINUED to work for another two years), set on fire, had beer or something poured on it, or tortured, it SHOULD continue to work tirelessly for at LEAST two years. This, however is not the case.

So since I don't have a lot of time to post from work (because believe it or not, I work when I'm at work), and my wife's company ties up our other two computers, blogging takes a bit of a backseat to those priorities. I'm not daunted though, I think there should be some way to make this all work and I'll be back at it in a few more days. Until then, I do not recommend the Panasonic Toughbook CF-29 to anyone and maybe someone from Panasonic will read this (yeah, right) and say, "hey, this isn't right, let's fix this problem, because we want our computer that we call a Toughbook to actually live up to its name and be tough and rugged".

Hope you all have a great evening and I'll find some way to keep in touch, but don't hold your breath, as it might take me a little longer to get back to you than you are used to.