...[What's New?]...

Hey! I am back.

Sorry for the lack of new material. I've been occupied with other things. I am dusting off my T100X to give it new blood.

Battery Replacement for about $35 each pack

Mike Smith writes: "I'd just call them- that's what I did. The web page wasn't anything great. Just a few white pages and company info. Their number is (303) 771-7112. The item number is (if I am reading the receipt right) TEC T6910H and the next line says 4/5AF GPI 1500MAH NI. $68.28 total +$4.00 shipping. I just realized thay charged me sales tax, too! I'm out of state. Well, too late now, but you might want to watch that." He said they could last more than one hour!

Remember the Lockout problem?

Recap: Bryan installed a 80mb drive. Machine began to ignore power off switch and locked up. He recently provided me an update:

Bryan: More info; I took out my 80MB drive and put the 40MB back in because of my "lockup problem". Now it works fine, so... I can rule out the memory card or anything wrong with the machine, its either the drive hardware, or the software that I have on it. I suspect the drive. Especially since I my machine locks up when you try to load the emm386 from DOS 6.22. Applying the fix pack on the Toshiba site fixes this. My lockups could be due to the 6.22 software, I'll try putting the Toshiba DOS on it some time; its a project though because I have to take the 40MB out and put it in another machine to get the DOS off it. (maybe there is a way to use FDISK /MBR to do this...)

Potential Summer Projects?

Bryan writes:

• the processor is AMD, the 25MHz part. It is surface mount. There was no obvious clock crystal or jumpers for a clock generator, so probably can't overclock it. There isn't enough room for one of those press-on 486 upgrades which need about 1" clearance I think.
• This is tempting, it looks like there might be enough room to perm. mount a type III drive in one of the slots. You would have to rip out the eject mechanism for the type II cards... That would let you get in a decent sized fast drive. I got a 130MB one for about $70 I think.
• You could probably squish in a regular 2.5 inch drive if you took out one or more of the backup batts. I think that one is just used to hold up the RAM during resume mode, so maybe you could live without that. You would have to make an extention cable for the 2.5" cable I think. I don't think that the BIOS will recognize bigger drives though; maybe you could use ontrack to partition it. Sounds like quite a project though...

Bob C on those infamous Window games...

• next topic...i just noticed something. just for the heck of it, i rotated the view on my T100X and tried to see if the apps are going to run OK. everything ran OK except for solitaire and winmine(expert level).
• on solitaire, all the cards would stack up on the upper left corner of the window. maximizing doesn't help. i know the cards are unresizable so even on regular view or in any other PC, if you adjust the size to make it small, it would chop off the rest of it. I'm surprised it didn't do the same for the rotated view on the T100X or at least have a left-right scroll bar.
• on winmine(expert level), the rightmost was chopped off because the width was to long but lower levels worked OK.
• all other apps resized accordingly. it's a good thing they're just games. i just hope there aren't any apps out there that can't resize properly.

...and MagnaRam

btw, magnaram works great. i see some improvement. I still have to get some hard numbers to compare against.