~Toughbooktalk~

I have searched this site and the web with no answers, why is the F 11 key Red on my new CF31 with Emissive keyboard, and why is the key protected (high ridge around the key), so that you really have to want to press it on purpose? I did not have this on my old CF27 with Emissive keyboard, but this new CF31 does, and yes I have read all the manuals first, but no mention of it.

Thanks, Ray

Ray,

This key is used in first responders as the "emergency button". The CF-19 has it too on the emmisive keyboard.

I once sold a CF-31 to a company and it didn't have that key labeled red and raised and they kicked it back to me because they NEEDED it to be red.

Hope this helps

Makes total sense about the emergency key, however I have also discovered that nearly all GPS mapping programs I have tried, F11 toggles full screen mode too.

a lot of programs have F11 as full screen toggle key.

The key is raised so that an officer can feel it in the dark, without looking at it, and trigger an emergency message. This would be very useful if someone that meant you harm were watching you...

Sorry, been away for a while, summer was brutal for my group, and on top of that I got transferred to a new assignment and am now back having to work for my pay.

The up side is I got issued a cf-31 to use, and was told the f11 key isn't working at the moment, but in a few weeks when we go to Premiere 1 CAD software it will, and make my car glow red in the dispatch console screen on their big map.

My new hours suck, but have been using the cf-31 quite a bit, and must confess its not as fast as I thought it would be. In its current setup, its SLOW on startup and shutdown, like 8-10 minutes each way, but I heard its because of some lag or conflict in the software with my air card. Who knows....

Give me a couple weeks and I'll hit the button and see what happens.


Once running it seems to do ok, but if I try to open outlook to check email, forget about it, it takes forever.

Dang, it does sound like you are having some kind of hardware issue, unless it's like the pc's at my work. The best one we have is a thinkpad with a 2.8 quad and 4gb of ram, dual graphics intel/nivida quadro. It's one of the slowest we have. The office is bad about recycling images of images and it has over 100 things going on start up. I think my Mk2 CF-28 runs faster.

This sounds like a login script that is not optimized for a remote login via cellular. When my company first transitioned to laptops that were connected in the field we had this issue, but it was more like 15-20 minutes. We got some experts from Microsoft to help us migrate from a batch file that executed on the local machine at login to a server login script that was optimized for the remote environment. Also, we had to watch for programs that are trying to check for updates at startup as they all tend to do it at once and flood the connection. Once all those issues were rectified, the login speed is much closer to normal.

Try logging on to the machine without the cellular connection if you can. If it logs in fine with no connection, then it is whatever login script or batch files that are running for your domain that are causing the slowdown.

Thank you, i will try that tomarrow. Sucks having to go to the car ten+ minutes early each day as i have to be logged on portal to portal, so cant pull out of the driveway till logged on the cad.