I remember when i used to have one of those 😁 I soon got rid of it though as the screen was abysmal for gaming 😒 big black borders and a very poor response time! Nice features for it's time but in my opinion the screen was a total let down (only if it was used for gaming).

PowerPie5000 wrote:

I remember when i used to have one of those 😁 I soon got rid of it though as the screen was abysmal for gaming 😒 big black borders and a very poor response time! Nice features for it's time but in my opinion the screen was a total let down (only if it was used for gaming).

To save me going through the manual, do you remember how to enter the BIOS config? Once I change the 12 yo BIOS battery I plan on changing some settings

Yes the bios on mine was a pain!! I am pretty sure it was F10 to enter the bios.... that's if you still have the bios partition on the hard drive of course (no chip bios in these i'm afraid!). I remember wiping my drive once and i lost the bios partition! but the laptop can still operate without the bios setup.

Select your model from here and see if you can still download the "Bios partition setup disk" : http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/prodTopCat … en&dlc=en&cc=uk

PowerPie5000 wrote:

Yes the bios on mine was a pain!! I am pretty sure it was F10 to enter the bios.... that's if you still have the bios partition on the hard drive of course (no chip bios in these i'm afraid!). I remember wiping my drive once and i lost the bios partition! but the laptop can still operate without the bios setup.

Mhhh...that's strange. On mine at least there is a BIOS chip. I wouldn't be able to boot otherwise because I changed the HDD. And it tells me on startup that settings have been reset due to the BIOS battery being depleted.

Also there would be no need for this battery if the BIOS was on the HDD.

MartinC wrote:

PowerPie5000 wrote:

Yes the bios on mine was a pain!! I am pretty sure it was F10 to enter the bios.... that's if you still have the bios partition on the hard drive of course (no chip bios in these i'm afraid!). I remember wiping my drive once and i lost the bios partition! but the laptop can still operate without the bios setup.

Mhhh...that's strange. On mine at least there is a BIOS chip. I wouldn't be able to boot otherwise because I changed the HDD. And it tells me on startup that settings have been reset due to the BIOS battery being depleted.

Also there would be no need for this battery if the BIOS was on the HDD.

Oh, thanks for the link 😀

The cmos battery also keeps the system time

Yes i think there is a bios chip that holds the basic settings but all the "user" settings are stored in a partition on the hard drive. I think it was known as the "F10 bios setup partition" or "ROMPAQ"... as mentioned the battery also store's the date and time... which you can only adjust if you have the bios setup partition 😖 I am also pretty sure the bios settings are written to the flash chip and hard drive partition so the battery is only for keeping the date and time.

I think most Compaq PC's and laptops from around that time had the bios setup stored on the hard drive.... not the greatest idea in my opinion. Did you find what you were looking for from the link?

hell i'm STILL dumping money in to my 2805 s202 toshiba i must have like 300 hundred in the f*ing thing.the mobo died then i got one that was 1 model higher and dead then got another one that is stock, mean while i had gotten rid of the original mobo then find to out the 1 model higher mobo has a different powerboard/battery adapter and now i'm gonna have just get a another mobo that has every thing on it sicne the on ei just got is bare. hopefully it will keep mom happy as little linux netbook.

That's gay. I hope your wrong. Anything useful in the BIOS setup?

cdoublejj you make me want to spend, 🤣, so I don't feel like a fool.

an honest waste could have bought new lappy if i had all that money at once.

cdoublejj wrote:

an honest waste could have bought new lappy if i had all that money at once.

Yeah you probably right. But its fun to rebuild an old machine, also that computer you bought would probably be "old" now too, but not old enough to be fun! Haha

Oh, you know I broke one of the plastic clips on the lappy when I took out the BIOS battery??? I got pretty angry, wanted to scrap the project, but it doesn't effect the unit at all, so I got over it, kinda..

As far as i can remeber with the Compaq "Rompaq bios" you can manually assign IRQ's to each device, adjust the PNP settings and fiddle around with the com and LPT ports etc.... pretty much what you would see in any other bios setup except the compaq one is a bit limited with features but that is normal with all commercial PC's (Dell, HP, IBM etc....)

MartinC wrote:

cdoublejj wrote:

an honest waste could have bought new lappy if i had all that money at once.

Yeah you probably right. But its fun to rebuild an old machine, also that computer you bought would probably be "old" now too, but not old enough to be fun! Haha

Oh, you know I broke one of the plastic clips on the lappy when I took out the BIOS battery??? I got pretty angry, wanted to scrap the project, but it doesn't effect the unit at all, so I got over it, kinda..

i had another dell r450 with a busted bezel have been thinking about little or slightly big things that don't glue so well with super glue might work better with jb weld. and yeah it is fun rebuilding oldies to bad s202 only has like 8mb gfx ram.

i'll have enough of these parts to buy some parts 2805 models and and have 2 hopefully up and running now the question is 2 linux install or xp on the second or the native win 200 on the second one or maybe even 98se but drivers might be a problem with 98.

Bottomline; depends what you want to do with it, despite what some may say Windows, including XP can be highly optimized for older hardware.

I went out & bought a CF card & adapter, it's a 150x card but I'm not sure if it supports DMA, I believe it must to run at these speeds however I can't find much information on this.

well my craptop runs now that shop had pulled those parts i dumped on the free table to the side and said i could have the little piece i needed. i have heard of using CF cards for HDDs big time i think some people like them for custom builds like stuffing a computer in an atari case and stuff like that.

I use a CF card and adapter for one of my Amiga 1200 systems and it's been great 😀 It's a hell of alot faster than using the old IDE hard drive. I have heard that CF cards are great at reading data but they can eventually "wear out" when constantly writing data? I am not 100% sure if this is true as i have been using mine for a while at both reading and writing and it's been fine.

Yea they have limited write lifetime. People really get caught up on it. I think it's a bit overblown. Maybe if you were using it for a task when it was constantly writing... But otherwise I think you'll replace it due to obsolescence before it dies in typical use.

I know that SSD drives often have a controller that spreads the writes out as evenly as possible. The actual location of data on the flash is only known to the controller. Not sure if CF card controllers do this.

It's not overblown it's a mathematical certainty. Once they reach their write/erase limit they start to fail.

I would also be interested to know if CF cards spread the data across the card?