Great. I can't use the 20GB drive because the BIOS will only see 8423MB. And it says 2013-11-01 is Saturday... Yeah right.

Maybe it needs a BIOS update? Well that's easier said than done.

heh... the difference one "_" makes... you can always use OnTrack Disk Manager in the case you won't be able to update the BIOS...
I have a retro K6-II laptop for my willem programmer, I find the DSTN screen to be a huge drawback... it's horrible!

Now that you mention DSTN, I see I confused the LCD types. The ICL screen is a passive-matrix TSTN, while the Dell actually has a TFT panel.
But the LCD is not the worst part of this display. The ugly scaling and weird font is. Why did they even bother to use some custom font? What was wrong with the standard VGA font? Even then, they could have at least picked a font that makes the scaling look better or something. But they just took some stupid sans-serif that doesn't look good anywhere!

I can probably get around that underscore bug by hex-editing the BIOS update... But what if there really is an incompatibility? I hope that doesn't brick it.

I haven't gazed upon any sort of passive matrix notebook in over 10 years. You guys are lucky 🤣 Make some HD YouTube videos for me!

Who's willing to make a passive matrix LCD shader, complete with fixed native resolution, simulated backlight, dithered 18-bit output, low brightness and crappy scaling? 😁

Wifi appears to work... somewhat.

Dell laptop (10.0.0.157) running mTCP FTPSRV here, connected over WEP encrypted wifi to my sister's laptop (...156), which is connected to the wired network.
On the other side, Pentium 3 (...155) running FTP from X:\ which is a shared folder on my Windows PC (...151) 🤣

The connnection is not very reliable though. Once I load the packet driver, it connects to the other laptop, and I can run one mTCP program. When it's finished it closes the connection and I have to reload the packet driver to connect again. Maybe MS Network Client will keep the connection open.

Good thing is, the device driver and packet driver (2x19kB) both load into UMB without crashing!

swaaye wrote:

I haven't gazed upon any sort of passive matrix notebook in over 10 years. You guys are lucky 🤣 Make some HD YouTube videos for me!

If you really want to see it... I guess I can make a video of some games. My camera is not very HD though.

leileilol wrote:

Who's willing to make a passive matrix LCD shader, complete with fixed native resolution, simulated backlight, dithered 18-bit output, low brightness and crappy scaling? 😁

Please call your psychiatrist.. NOW 🤣

don't forget the dead pixels! the laptop I have must have 20-30 of them but they all blend in with the general blurriness of the display 🤣

Aww that sucks. I haven't seen any on these laptops, but it wouldn't surprise me if the ICL screen has some. I did notice most pixels don't have equal brightness, which makes the display look very grainy. It's hard to capture that on camera though.

I had a retro laptop too which died,and that was a Dell Inspiron 4100.It could run Vista or 7 though.It had 512MB RAM,a 10GB HDD(I think,never checked),1GHz Pentium 3-M.I ran mostly Ford Racing 2 and 3 on it,Mashed-Drive to Survive,Carmageddon 2 and GTA Vice City.Sadly,the power connector broke off,and I don't have another one to put in.It's now replaced by my Pentium 4 1.7GHz.I still don't know what to choose:
1.Windows 2000 SP4
2.Windows XP SP3
3.Windows Vista Lite(with bypassed RAM limitation obiviously)
The HDD has 160GB free,so there's plenty of room there.

Great... It seems NDIS drivers for this wifi card are hard to find. Now I have to use some stupid (= memory hungry) kludge like PD -> ODI -> NDIS2 shims to use MS Network Client.
Maybe someone can help me find them? It's a Dell TrueMobile 1150 card, an Orinoco Gold clone. Also produced under Agere, Lucent and many other brand names.

PcBytes wrote:

I had a retro laptop too which died,and that was a Dell Inspiron 4100.It could run Vista or 7 though.It had 512MB RAM,a 10GB HDD […]
Show full quote

I had a retro laptop too which died,and that was a Dell Inspiron 4100.It could run Vista or 7 though.It had 512MB RAM,a 10GB HDD(I think,never checked),1GHz Pentium 3-M.I ran mostly Ford Racing 2 and 3 on it,Mashed-Drive to Survive,Carmageddon 2 and GTA Vice City.Sadly,the power connector broke off,and I don't have another one to put in.It's now replaced by my Pentium 4 1.7GHz.I still don't know what to choose:
1.Windows 2000 SP4
2.Windows XP SP3
3.Windows Vista Lite(with bypassed RAM limitation obiviously)
The HDD has 160GB free,so there's plenty of room there.

I also used to have a P3 1GHz laptop! It was the normal (non-M) CPU though. It ran pretty hot and I always had a large fan next to it to keep it from overheating and crashing 🤣
One day the TFT broke and I decided it wasn't worth fixing so I took it apart. The 20GB drive from that system is what I wanted to use in this Dell laptop.

Power connectors are about the easiest thing to fix, even if you can't find a replacement you can just run the wires outside the case and solder an external plug on.
A P4 at 1.7GHz is not very fast. It will definitely choke on Windows Vista. I personally like Win2K for it's speed and little bloat, but newer programs like modern browsers won't run without unofficial updates and hacks. XP might be the best option here. If you don't need a modern browser I'd say, go with Win2K 😀

I don't have the laptop anymore.
Also,I guess you still have that 1GHz laptop?It's worth repairing,those ones are pretty nice.
For the P4,I don't know what to say.....even XP runs slow.(I have 256MB RAM)

jwt27 wrote:

The connnection is not very reliable though. Once I load the packet driver, it connects to the other laptop, and I can run one mTCP program. When it's finished it closes the connection and I have to reload the packet driver to connect again. Maybe MS Network Client will keep the connection open.

I hate reading about problems like that. 99% of the time it's not a problem in mTCP. But in your case ...

Just by accident I happened to be looking at the FTP server source code and noticed that I'm not restoring the DOS Ctrl-Break handler on exit. I do this on probably every other application and it was probably just a cut and paste error. But missing that can cause erratic behavior after the FTP server exits. You might be suffering from this.

If you can run the other mTCP programs several times in a row and FTPSrv is the only program that causes this, then it is a good bet that this is the problem. If you want to try a test version send me an email - my address is plastered all over the mTCP docs. I'll mail you a test binary to try.

-Mike

mbbrutman wrote:

I hate reading about problems like that. 99% of the time it's not a problem in mTCP. But in your case ... […]
Show full quote

jwt27 wrote:

The connnection is not very reliable though. Once I load the packet driver, it connects to the other laptop, and I can run one mTCP program. When it's finished it closes the connection and I have to reload the packet driver to connect again. Maybe MS Network Client will keep the connection open.

I hate reading about problems like that. 99% of the time it's not a problem in mTCP. But in your case ...

Just by accident I happened to be looking at the FTP server source code and noticed that I'm not restoring the DOS Ctrl-Break handler on exit. I do this on probably every other application and it was probably just a cut and paste error. But missing that can cause erratic behavior after the FTP server exits. You might be suffering from this.

If you can run the other mTCP programs several times in a row and FTPSrv is the only program that causes this, then it is a good bet that this is the problem. If you want to try a test version send me an email - my address is plastered all over the mTCP docs. I'll mail you a test binary to try.

-Mike

Hey, posting this from the Dell right now 😀 (in Arachne, which is EXTREMELY slow without disk
cache...)
I'm pretty sure it's not a bug in mTCP, and the ctrl-break handler
certainly has nothing to do with it. It just seems to take a while to
reconnect, and Arachne (which also closes the connection on exit) will
hang for about 10 seconds at first, then resume. mTCP is just a bit
impatient and says "timeout waiting for ARP response" or "error resolving server"
after a few seconds. Being able to adjust the timeout delay would be a
nice feature 😀

Well, obviously Windows XP Service Pack 3 will be slow as hell with 256 MB RAM. The problem with your Pentium 4 is not the CPU but the small RAM, and if you use SP3, the version of the system you are using. People run Windows 7 on Atom machines with the speed of a Pentium 3. RAM is the critical thing here, I remember when a friend increased the RAM from 256 MB to 512 MB his old Athlon 1.1 Ghz system became A LOT snappier. With 1 GB, it will be a night day difference.

It is true that the Pentium IV 1.7 Ghz is one of the slowest P4s ever made but it should be equivalent to a 1.4 Ghz P3 at least. The problem is, the supposed "crappiness" of Willamete P4 is usually caused by slow SDRAM or RDRAM as opposed to the CPU itself. A DDR equipped Willamete should be decent.

Yeah....weird that Atom machines are slow,aren't they supposed to be equipped decently enough to run 7?I have a Aspire One running Windows 7 and it's faster even than both of those machines.(my Sempron box and my P4 box).
The motherboard uses DDR266 RAM (so it's DDR after all,regardless of what frequency it uses)so I don't see why it would run so slow,knowing that my 256MB stick I use is DDR400.(the system recognizes it,so not a problem)

256 MB is simply not enough. I had 320 MB even when I was a little kid in a Celeron Coppermine 1 Ghz machine.

Just took the Dell apart, mostly because I wanted to check if the BIOS chip was socketed (or if it can be replaced)... and because I was just curious to see what's inside.

The top part was surprisingly easy to remove. It took only three screws to remove the keyboard and trackball, and another two to remove the screen and back legs. The TFT connector, on the other hand, was fixed to the mainboard with three screws! Another three (and some flatcables) were enough to remove the mainboard. The voltage regulators are located on a separate daughterboard mounted upside-down on the mainboard.

First thing I noticed was the sound chip, it's actually an ES1888S instead of 1688. That might explain why the drivers for it didn't work. Here's a picture with the CPU "heatsink" in the background.
http://imageshack.us/a/img17/2609/nmie.jpg
Notice the flatcable on the right, looks like it's damaged! I think it's only used for the COM/LPT ports so that's no big deal.
http://imageshack.us/a/img801/6856/7v6k.jpg

The RTC/CMOS battery, which needs replacement, is rather odd. It's a 7.2V pack composed of 6 NiCd cells:
http://imageshack.us/a/img405/2359/z408.jpg

Nice optical(!) trackball. Again made in Japan. The only non-Japanese part I found so far is the 2" speaker, made in China (by Sony...)
http://imageshack.us/a/img823/7061/9rd5.jpg

The keyboard switches use an uncommon design (at least, I've never seen it before). It appears to be a normal rubber dome switch, NOT the scissor-type you'd expect on a laptop, with an inverted (large side up) open dome, and what appears to be a capacitive switch underneath:
http://imageshack.us/a/img27/2641/9utd.jpg

Well, all these stupid details aside, I still haven't located the BIOS chip. Looks like it's buried below several sheets of aluminium along with the rest of the mainboard. Removing that requires removal of the CPU heatsink and everything else on the mainboard which is where most of the screws were spent on.

PcBytes wrote:

Yeah....weird that Atom machines are slow,aren't they supposed to be equipped decently enough to run 7?I have a Aspire One running Windows 7 and it's faster even than both of those machines.(my Sempron box and my P4 box).
The motherboard uses DDR266 RAM (so it's DDR after all,regardless of what frequency it uses)so I don't see why it would run so slow,knowing that my 256MB stick I use is DDR400.(the system recognizes it,so not a problem)

I think Win2K would be your best option here, I use it on a P3-550 with 256MB SDRAM and it's pretty snappy. Windows XP SP3 on my main machine (P4-3200, 2GB DDR400, please don't laugh) is a bit faster, although I'm sure Win2K would be even better here. Unfortunately MS dropped support for it, which means anything compiled with latest MSVC, or anything using .NET won't run without hacks. There are unofficial updates available but I haven't had much luck with them yet: http://windows2000.tk/
Otherwise you could try some alternative OS like Linux/BSD, or... FreeDOS (good luck finding anything faster than that 😀)

XP SP3 runs very well on the Northwood Hyper-threaded 3 Ghz P4 we have in our office. A Willamete P4 is a whole another beast through. They bought a bad name on the whole Pentium 4 family.

I'll see if I can turn the P4 into a old gaming rig,using Windows 98 SE.(Windows 2000 SP4 keeps crashing with KMODE something for no apparent reason)
The motherboard is made entirely by Intel,it's a Intel D845GLAD Desktop Board.