Toughbooks?

titmouse

titmouse

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What is your experience with them? The ones we have seem to be laggy as hell =/
 
Ours aren't extremely laggy. The thing I hate is that we have 2 toughbooks per ambulance.
 
firefite said:
Ours aren't extremely laggy. The thing I hate is that we have 2 toughbooks per ambulance.
Click to expand...

Does thst mean you have to write two reports per pt?
 
Fine, as long as they dont get to hot, leave them on sleep when not in use and shut them down at the end of the shift
 
Our tougbooks used for communications with county dispatch were usually not laggy, unless there was inclement weather. Then, while the computer itself would be fine, it would take forever to send and receive messages.

Our handheld tablet ran very smoothly. It was also very small and required a bluetooth keyboard and stylus, so I never used it. I just did all my reports at the station.
 
They ran ok on XP, they're a lot more buggy since we upgraded to Windows 7. Not enough processor power / ram.
 
I had it completely freeze up on me. That was pretty annoying. The second time I lost my soap report =/
 
Not a fan for the above reasons.

At somewhere around $3 grand each, my $1200 Samsung Ultrabook is miles a head of it and an Ipad with a $100 case sounds like a steal.
 
For what a toughbook cost, they are garbage.

If they were $1,000 fine, but its a $3,000 laptop plus $1200 for a charging mount. It should be lightning fast for that price and it is slower than most old laptops loaded with programs.
 
We use them in our trucks for the CAD and mapping. That works well, but they're laggy if you're using them to write a report on the Citrix farm.
 
Ours are ok. Rumor has it the company bought refurbished units and that's why they're slow, I just think we had software implementation issues. The touchscreens on ours (CF29 laptops) are god awful and so is battery life.
 
+1 on the low batter life
 
Our charger mounts are located in the pass through between the cab and the rest of the vanbulance as well, so there is no place to secure it in back. So it sits in the bench waiting for a convenient time to rifle into my brain.
 
titmouse said:
Does thst mean you have to write two reports per pt?
Click to expand...

Sorry for the late response. 1 tough-book is used only for ePCR and the other one is used for our CAD/MDT/GPS
 
How intensive is implementing CAD into a department? I am a member on a student run ALS college squad with that responds into a handful of cities and towns where it would be useful for updates, NAV ect. What's the upfront cost for dispatch and implementation on two trucks?
 
Honestly have no clue. We have had the CAD for 5+ years so even if I could get info it wouldn't be accurate.

My guess is probably fairly expensive. You have to have the computer system + modems in each ambulance + the receiving computers.

We also have a paging system integrated into the CAD system.
 
rwik123 said:
How intensive is implementing CAD into a department? I am a member on a student run ALS college squad with that responds into a handful of cities and towns where it would be useful for updates, NAV ect. What's the upfront cost for dispatch and implementation on two trucks?
Click to expand...

Our ePCR program by ESO solutions has a built in CAD program. It does a fairly good job of entering all the dispatch info into your PCR, but for whatever reason we really struggle to get dispatch information at the same time as the radio dispatch. I'm not sure if our dispatchers are not entering the call information right away or if the system just doesn't update until we start transporting for some reason.

The CAD feature has no NAV, it just sends you the address and maybe the call type if you're lucky. We have stand alone GPS units so this isn't an issue, but it takes time to copy the info over.
 
We used toughbooks for awhile without any major issues (although I always hated their battery life). Glad we upgraded to Ipads though. Better connectivity, and a whole lot cheaper. Moving to mini's now because they have an even better price point.
 
I use toughbooks at two agencies
Full time job has bascially locked down the laptop so we can only access EMSCharts, the CAD and Google Maps. WE have no problems with them nd they work pretty well

Part Time Job has unrestricted access and they are crap. Mostly becuause the crews use them as personal computers and surf the internet on them, downloading all kinds of malware and such

Our PD just switched to the Dell Latitude XFRs, which i like better but i would like to move to Ipads. However EMScharts has not released their app yet so there is no real point to do so.
 
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