NOTES ABOUT NOTEBOOKS PAST
I tend to accumulate last-generation tech in such a way that I do
start to exist in a bit of a time warp. As I don't have any real
interest in buying new tech, I'm pretty vague about the latest
products and technologies. Instead I learn about them 10-15 years
later via dated Wikipedia articles and abandoned websites, while
trying to understand some thing I've been given or bought for $5.
As part of my brief attempt at being a dodgy laptop reseller guy,
before I decided that the pointless extra hardware requirements of
Windows 11 would put an end to it before long anyway, I accumulated
a few notebooks. The sort of junk I've been getting is all around
2010s era. Proper notebooks from that time are borderline worth my
time (worth over $100 means I might make ~$50 profit for a
day/afternoon of messing around cleaning, installing replacement
parts, and photographing), but I've also picked up a couple of
sub-spec budget notebooks which really aren't worth the effort
trying to sell today.
But combined with an even cheaper and lower-spec one that I picked
up years ago at a hamfest for $5-10, they serve as an interesting
comparison. Not a very useful one, because I only have them because
nobody wants any of them anymore, but an interesting one to me. One
also now has the benefit of all the info collected online by past
users, which is surprisingly volumous for two of them. So here's my
short summary.
First off a pic of all the contenders, next to my "daily drive"
laptop, a 2001 model Thinkpad R31, which is there for scale but
also has roughly similar specs to the two notebooks on the left
introduced around 7 years later. No built-in WiFi though, hence the
beat-up PCMCIA WiFi card poking out the side.
gopher://aussies.space/I/~freet/photos/notebooks/notebooks+thinkpad_big.JPG
gopher://aussies.space/I/~freet/photos/notebooks/notebooks+thinkpad.JPG
(big is just higher resolution (and 374KB), all other photos here
are 800 pixels wide (average ~70KB) - yes I for one still care
about JPG sizes)
THE BIG
Top left is the closest thing to a full-spec notebook from the late
2000s era. In fact it looks just like proper HP notebooks from the
era and shares many design features with them. But it hides a
secret, whereas others might have had a Core i7 CPU and 4GB+ RAM,
this poor thing is stuck with a 1GHz processor and 1GB DDR2 RAM
(2GB max). It's actually therefore about the same spec as that old
Thinkpad next to it (though its VIA C7-M CPU maybe isn't so nice as
the Thinkpad's Pentium III - less than a 5th of the Thermal Design
Power though) which I used to have 1GB RAM in until one day the
chipset started getting upset and crashing with anything over
768MB. In terms of storage space things get really nasty though. On
one hand it's an IDE-connected SSD, which is nice, but on the other
it only has 1GB capacity! Now this thing is from 2008 and HP is a
fairly good brand so what were they doing putting out low-spec
stuff like this?
Well the model number is "2533t" and after finding the service
manual online all is explained. This is actually just a mobile thin
client PC. It came with Windows XP Embedded and was designed for
running software via a server in a big orgainisation. Actually much
like I'm doing for running internet software on my internet client
Atomic Pi SBC and displaying on old/unupdated PCs, though I rather
doubt that HP's system used the X window system.
So in a big company a little money is saved (by either the company,
or possibly an IT contractor) by not having to give all the
employees a full-spec notebook. But unlike a lot of these thin
clients that I've picked up in non-portable form, this is still a
proper PC rather than some ARM, MIPS, etc. concoction pretty much
locked to Windows CE, which makes it a lot more versatile.
Peripheral-wise it's also quite nice. One big plus is the
trackpoint on the keyboard, which I always prefer to touchpads. The
keyboard itself is also quite nice for a laptop. It has audio+mic
connections, SD card reader, 12" screen, VGA out, and three USB
ports (probably USB2, but it doesn't say in the service manual),
one in place of the optional CDROM drive. It also has a PCMCIA
port, which offers extra options for expansion (eg. Compact Flash
adapter for some unobtrusive extra storage without resorting to
slow SD cards). 802.11a/b/g WiFi and Gbit Ethernet for the
all-important (for a thin clinet) network connectivity. The RAM is
also apparantly expandable to 2GB.
Build quiality is good, and has clearly been put to the test based
on dents to the aluminium-shelled lid. Size and weight aren't so
far from a full-size laptop though compared to the cheap little
things to come. 1.14Kg on my scales without battery.
This is also the only one of my notebooks with a battery in it that
still works, though it is an after-market one. A former owner has
installed MSDOS on it, which isn't all that well suited to a PC
without a floppy drive and presumably no DOS USB/PCMCIA drivers
available - probably why they never put on any software. Wack on a
small Linux system along with that CF card + adapter for data
storage and it could serve me very well if I had a good use for
another near-laptop-sized portable PC.
Service manual:
https://tim.id.au/laptops/hp/hp%202533t%20mobile%20thin%20client.pdf
CPU info:
https://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/C7-M/VIA-C7-M%201000-400.html
The SMALL
Bottom left is an ASUS Eee PC 701SD. Looking back into the old
internet articles these things seems to have caused a bit of a stir
at their launch, mid 2007, for introducing a new smaller, cheaper,
form factor for notebooks. At something around $500AUD at
introduction though, they still weren't anywhere near the sort of
cheapness which would have me buy one rather than just get some old
second-hand laptop and put up with the extra size/weight.
A users website was set up and collected a great array of
information on the Wiki before going offline. The 7" screen is
quite a ways under the 12" of that HP, and combined with the little
keys and somewhat featureless case it does look a bit like a toy.
The specs, however, put it still close-ish to my Thinkpad, sporting
a 630MHz clocked Celeron-M CPU and 512MB DDR2 RAM (upgradable to
2GB). It has an 8GB SSD on a removable PCIe card, which is much
nicer than that HP's 1GB.
The small keyboard is awkward, but doesn't feel too bad.
Peripherals are good, with 3x USB2 ports, audio+mic, VGA out,
web-cam,, 802.11b/g WiFi, and 10/100 Mbps Ethernet. It also has an
SD card reader, suitable for extra data sotorage. It feels
surprisingly solid, without the flexing that you often feel with
more modern thin laptops, though I wouldn't bet on it surviving the
sort of abuse that my HP thin client looks to have been through.
Mine has a classic "Designed for Windows XP" slapped on it (looking
slightly out of proportion on such a small case), but apparantly
ASUS sold these with Linux pre-installed as well, so they were a
rare chance to buy a PC-architecture laptop without paying the
"Microsoft tax". Now though, mine fails to find an OS after the
BIOS self-check, which means that either someone wiped it, or more
likely that they wore out the SSD. It looks like the BIOS is
probably willing to boot from USB though.
Weight without battery is just 660g, so it is a lot easier to carry
about one-handed than the HP thing (to say nothing of my Thinkpad),
and it's small enough that you wouldn't need a bulky bag for it
either. The battery refuses to charge - the charging light just
blinks.
I don't think you'd get far running Firefox or Chrome on this (with
the HP you might just about manage, if you tweak some settings and
use NoScript), but for most other tasks I think it would still be
usable with a minimal Linux installation for tasks where the screen
size isn't too limiting, if you pick the right lightweight
applications (which I use everywhere anyway).
Eee PC 701 at the EeeUser Wiki
http://web.archive.org/web/20140110084425/http://wiki.eeeuser.com/eee_pc_701
THE UGLY
Now onto the one that I actually bought, at the hamfest, and that
would have been well over five years ago so it newer 'to me' than
the others. The bloke selling it actually had two notebooks on his
table, the other being a bigger/better one and that one had already
sold (while I'd passed them by looking for more interesting stuff).
However only when I expressed interest in this one did the seller
notice that the buyer of the other notebook had taken this thing's
power supply as well. It worked out well for me in the end, because
I got the price down on the basis that I'd need a PSU, and it
turned out I had a suitable 9V 2A one in my junk plugpack
collection at home (also works with the Eee PC which didn't come
with one either!).
The PSU compatibility seems to be a theme because this thing,
identified only as "7" Notebook" on the dual Chinese / English
sticker on the bottom, looks very much to be a cheap rip-off of
ASUS' already 'cheap' Taiwanese Eee PC design.
If the Eee PC looked a bit like a toy, my "7" Notebook" in its
creeky cherry-red/silver plastic shell both looks and feels
absolutely like one of those "my first laptop" toys that used to be
around. In fact the plastic on top is actually slightly see-through.
Unfortunately it's also left the realm of PC-compatibily, kicking
Windows CE 6.0 along with a 300MHz ARM-WM8505 CPU and 128MB onboard
RAM. Storage is reportedly 2GB NAND flash, though the OS seems to
take up a lot of that if so, because it reports only 256MB (this is
Windows though, so you can't believe anything it says). It does
have an SD card slot, as well as audio+mic, 10/100Mbps Ethernet,
and (really poor - I need to be within a few meters of my wireless
router) 802.11b/g WiFi. It also has three USB ports, but two are
only for keyboard/mouse HID devices, so that's a bit of a gotcha.
Compared with the Eee PC it's missing VGA out and the web cam.
The keyboard is really quite bad, though not nearly so annoying as
the touchpad where the left mouse button actually presses on the
touchpad and causes the position to move wildly when you press it,
so you have to tap the pad for clicks (which I've never been very
good at). The screen is decent though, as well as the sound, and in
my personal case it's nice that it boots to a working OS (which
only takes ~30 sec.). The battery was dead, and is actually just a
naked wrapped buch of cells held under a screwed-down flap on the
bottom. Weight without battery is one thing that it has over the
Eee PC, only 560g.
Based on the Chinese text this seems to have been produced for both
the domestic Chinese market as well as overseas, and this one was
probably originally bought off Ebay or a similar website rather
than from a regular retailer. I have my doubts about whether
Windows CE 6.0 would have been officially licenced from Microsoft
too - for one thing it's copyright 2006 whereas the device seems to
have been sold around 2010. It seems to have also been sold with
Linux installed, and I believe the architecture is ARMv5T so it
would be compatible with the armel packages for Debian.
There's been an interesting amount of work done for getting Linux
to run on ARM-WM8505 devices (also including various old tablets)
in the past. But this all seems to have been abandoned and the
mailing list for this suggests that there are major audio and
flash-storage driver issues with current Linux kernel versions.
There's also a video on YouTube showing someone running Android on
one, but Android actually looks even worse than Windows CE to me. I
never actually tracked down the instructions for installing another
OS on it, but one site shows where the serial port can be accessed
on the circuit board, so you can probably use TFTP or something,
controlled from the serial terminal.
I decided to stick with Windows CE, for lack of a clearly
successful path to Linux. The only actual use that I found for the
thing has been a video player that is small enough to sit on my
workbench while I assemble electronics. The video is a bit choppy
but watchable for the sort of documentary stuff I watch, however it
tends to pause, probably because it can't keep up reading the video
file, and then the audio sync gets lost. A media player called Core
Player seems to be the best, but it's still not quite good enough.
I looked around for SSH clients in the past but never found much
free software for Windows CE 6 and ARM (with different versions and
architectures, finding suitable WinCE software is a real pain).
Recently though I noticed in my downloads folder a copy of Pocket
PuTTY, confusing labeled as for "WM2003" (Windows Mobile 2003),
downloaded sometime earlier when I was getting distracted. I copied
it over via the 1GB SD card that I've taken to keeping in it and
what do you know, it works. It won't connect to SSH servers
requiring the latest key exchange algorithums, but it does connect
to more lenient ones as well as offering Telnet access to my
Internet Client computer. From icli I can use text-based web
browsers and all that fun (because of course the copy of IE in
winCE 6 is dead to modern HTTPS), as well as SSH/Mosh into
aussies.space and the like. Thinking about how to access downloaded
files, I also discovered an FTP client for winCE (no WinCE didn't
include Telnet or FTP clients by default, at least not in this
installation). It uses a pretty weird command syntax, but it seems
to work. So it's altogether useful, but I still don't really have a
use for it. Maybe I'll look into replacing the battery sometime
though.
WM8505 Linux mailing list:
http://groups.google.com/group/vt8500-wm8505-linux-kernel
Modified Linux kernel:
https://github.com/projectgus/kernel_wm8505
Debian armel platform info:
https://wiki.debian.org/ArmEabiPort
Hacking the WM8505 Mini Laptop:
https://wm8505.blogspot.com/2010/07/hacking-wm8505-mini-laptop.html
PocketPuTTY:
http://web.archive.org/web/20081230162239/http://www.pocketputty.net/
Open-Source FTP Client with compatible Win CE 6 version:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/ultralightftpc/
Photos of this and the Eee PC:
keyboard layouts
gopher://aussies.space/I/~freet/photos/notebooks/7in/keyboards.JPG
without the battery, the 7" Notebook falls over when the screen is
bent back
gopher://aussies.space/I/~freet/photos/notebooks/7in/tippy-top.JPG
Photos of WinCE on the 7" Notebook:
Desktop
gopher://aussies.space/I/~freet/photos/notebooks/7in/desktop.JPG
FTP tests
gopher://aussies.space/I/~freet/photos/notebooks/7in/FTP.JPG
gopher://aussies.space/I/~freet/photos/notebooks/7in/FTP_downloaded.JPG
Pocket PuTTY connecting to aussies.space via Telnet to icli
gopher://aussies.space/I/~freet/photos/notebooks/7in/Pocket_PuTTY.JPG
gopher://aussies.space/I/~freet/photos/notebooks/7in/Lynx.JPG
Video playback in Core Player ("Introduction to Holography" is a
really interesting educational film, by the way)
gopher://aussies.space/I/~freet/photos/notebooks/7in/video_playback.JPG
Well, I hope someone got something from all that. I think I'm done
with notebooks for (what's left of) today!
- The Free Thinker