A few months back, I hit up a junk sale and bought a bunch of sick laptop computers. One of them was going to be my pet project as the price was right. You can't get much for $1 these days, but I did.
The victim (at first glance):
HP Omnibook 6100
Pentium III-M CPU @ 1GHz
512MB PC-133 SDRAM
no hard disk
16MB ATI Radeon Mobility M6 GPU
cracked 14.1" XGA LCD
Magnesium Alloy rear display casing
dead battery pack
Having experienced the joy of the Pentium M CPUs, I knew that the PIII-M was the missing link between it and the previous Pentium III chips. The Mobile Pentium III wasn't an ideal mobile CPU. Even though Intel added SpeedStep technology, allowing the CPU to decrease speed to save battery power, the voltage stayed the same. This isn't necessary. With the Pentium III-M, Intel changed their approach, dropping core voltage when speed is decreased. This was a huge help.
The cracked LCD was replaced with the display from an Omnibook 6000 with a bad trackstick I picked up (also for $1). Upon replacing this and starting the system, I was greeted with a password screen. Uh oh... Denied. I tried guessing the code and got nowhere so I went searching for a solution. There used to be a guy who would crack the codes using the hash code accessible through a key combination on startup, but this was back in 2006. After giving HP a call, intending to pay their $39 asking price for an unlock, I received a runaround with the usual confusion between a BIOS password and a hard disk password. No help (though the Canadian service rep lady was very nice), but HP/Compaq has stopped supporting Omnibooks, anyway, so I didn't expect much. They aren't IBM/Lenovo, after all.
Next! A trip to eBay later, I had my solution. A company there sells the chip that holds the password. They needed to know my display panel type, as the system keeps your LCD info in the same chip, but I was able to get the right one. The chip's not worth the immediate purchase asking price for such an old system, but it was well worth the $25 I paid for it to have a working computer.
I took the system apart using the service manual HP made available and came to find that the system had a secret that made it quite unique. In addition to having on-board LAN, it was also made with WiFi as an option. Mine didn't have the WiFi gear installed, but I would fix that soon. Having WiFi optional meant the mini-PCI card slot was open, but what I didn't expect was a second mini-PCI slot housing the modem underneath the hard drive slot. Bonus! The only other system I've ever seen with two mini-PCI slots is my Alienware M9700 and it's really no challenge to fit a second mini-PCI slot in such a large system. There is potential here.
I took the motherboard to work with me off-the-clock to solder the new chip in. Five minutes and a little lead-free solder later, the chip was installed. I drove home shortly after, antsy to see if I had resurrected yet another computer. An hour and a bunch of screws later, the system started without issue, but would shut off randomly because the battery pack was just _that_ bad. No matter. $45 and two days later, I had my new pack and could now go cordless.
Testing the battery life, I found that the system wasn't actively computing power consumption. It seemed to think that the constant load on the pack was 15W, working out to a 4hr battery life. Not true. Using some shareware I downloaded, I found that the actual discharge rate in dynamic mode worked out to a 6-7 hour battery life for the work I do. Fair enough. That's between 8 and 9 watts consumption. Not much heat there, which is easier on my lap than the 25-30W my Dell P4 laptop sucks down.
Having read up on the Radeon M6 GPU, I found that it wasn't really an all-out GPU at all. It doesn't have internal Transform and Lighting units, unlike most units today. Since my goal was to run a Nintendo64 emulator, I didn't really need this capability. I had run one on my Nvidia TNT2 card back in the day and it did fine. And that system was a 550MHz overclocked Celeron rig.
For fun, I attempted to run 3DMark2001SE on the system to see what would happen. With the driver Microsoft included with XP, it wouldn't run at default resolution. Updating to the HP-supplied driver allowed it to run. I scored 1948 3DMarks. That's a little over half the speed of the Radeon 7500 GPU and good enough for me. Project64 ran perfectly when I tested it with Mario Kart 64. And the colors... wow! I didn't expect them to be so bright.
I intend to use the computer for light 3D and CAD work since the display turned out looking better than I expected. While 16MB isn't much in the way of display RAM, it's enough to drive my display with XGA resolution while leaving a few megabytes for texture RAM.
I loaded my Proxim WiFi A/B/G card into the non-hidden mini-PCI slot and ran a spare cable/panel antenna combo I had from a Toshiba Tecra 8200 up to the top of the rear display casing where I attached the panel antenna to the portion of the case that wasn't metal. This was a far better location for the antenna than the one HP used. One small antenna hidden in the hinge portion of the system isn't going to get you far.
With drivers installed and the antenna hooked to the proper connector, I had succeeded in adding WiFi to my "new" laptop.
As for the second Mini-PCI slot, I took the modem out since I haven't needed a modem in six years. I could replace it with something and it looks like a USB 2.0 card is the most useful option. The cards are $50 and provide four USB 2.0 ports. I intend to find a way to convert the two USB ports on the rear of the system to 2.0 and feed the data lines of the original ports to internal accessories. I'm leaning toward Bluetooth and a wireless gamepad receiver. I'll keep an eye out for the card I want.
I wish the system wasn't so large, but I can't complain there. It was meant to replace my Toshiba Portege 3490CT, which I couldn't use as well as I'd have liked, owing to the cramped keyboard, 256MB RAM limit and problem with heat dissipation to locations other than my lap. The Omnibook weighs almost twice as much, but it's worth it.
Comparison:
CPU:
Omnibook: 1GHz PIII-M, 512K L2 cache, 133MHz frontside bus speed
Portege 3490CT: 700MHz Mobile PIII, 256K L2 cache, 100MHz frontside bus speed
CPU power save:
Omnibook: throttles back to 533MHz and drops core voltage
Portege 3490CT: throttles back to 500MHz with same voltage
CPU software power saving:
Omnibook: power-on-demand throttling
Portege 3490CT: duty-cycle throttling down to 133MHz speed equivalent (where I achieved 8W load)
RAM:
Omnibook: Two open slots, standard PC133 SODIMM, 1GB limit
The victim (at first glance):
HP Omnibook 6100
Pentium III-M CPU @ 1GHz
512MB PC-133 SDRAM
no hard disk
16MB ATI Radeon Mobility M6 GPU
cracked 14.1" XGA LCD
Magnesium Alloy rear display casing
dead battery pack
Having experienced the joy of the Pentium M CPUs, I knew that the PIII-M was the missing link between it and the previous Pentium III chips. The Mobile Pentium III wasn't an ideal mobile CPU. Even though Intel added SpeedStep technology, allowing the CPU to decrease speed to save battery power, the voltage stayed the same. This isn't necessary. With the Pentium III-M, Intel changed their approach, dropping core voltage when speed is decreased. This was a huge help.
The cracked LCD was replaced with the display from an Omnibook 6000 with a bad trackstick I picked up (also for $1). Upon replacing this and starting the system, I was greeted with a password screen. Uh oh... Denied. I tried guessing the code and got nowhere so I went searching for a solution. There used to be a guy who would crack the codes using the hash code accessible through a key combination on startup, but this was back in 2006. After giving HP a call, intending to pay their $39 asking price for an unlock, I received a runaround with the usual confusion between a BIOS password and a hard disk password. No help (though the Canadian service rep lady was very nice), but HP/Compaq has stopped supporting Omnibooks, anyway, so I didn't expect much. They aren't IBM/Lenovo, after all.
Next! A trip to eBay later, I had my solution. A company there sells the chip that holds the password. They needed to know my display panel type, as the system keeps your LCD info in the same chip, but I was able to get the right one. The chip's not worth the immediate purchase asking price for such an old system, but it was well worth the $25 I paid for it to have a working computer.
I took the system apart using the service manual HP made available and came to find that the system had a secret that made it quite unique. In addition to having on-board LAN, it was also made with WiFi as an option. Mine didn't have the WiFi gear installed, but I would fix that soon. Having WiFi optional meant the mini-PCI card slot was open, but what I didn't expect was a second mini-PCI slot housing the modem underneath the hard drive slot. Bonus! The only other system I've ever seen with two mini-PCI slots is my Alienware M9700 and it's really no challenge to fit a second mini-PCI slot in such a large system. There is potential here.
I took the motherboard to work with me off-the-clock to solder the new chip in. Five minutes and a little lead-free solder later, the chip was installed. I drove home shortly after, antsy to see if I had resurrected yet another computer. An hour and a bunch of screws later, the system started without issue, but would shut off randomly because the battery pack was just _that_ bad. No matter. $45 and two days later, I had my new pack and could now go cordless.
Testing the battery life, I found that the system wasn't actively computing power consumption. It seemed to think that the constant load on the pack was 15W, working out to a 4hr battery life. Not true. Using some shareware I downloaded, I found that the actual discharge rate in dynamic mode worked out to a 6-7 hour battery life for the work I do. Fair enough. That's between 8 and 9 watts consumption. Not much heat there, which is easier on my lap than the 25-30W my Dell P4 laptop sucks down.
Having read up on the Radeon M6 GPU, I found that it wasn't really an all-out GPU at all. It doesn't have internal Transform and Lighting units, unlike most units today. Since my goal was to run a Nintendo64 emulator, I didn't really need this capability. I had run one on my Nvidia TNT2 card back in the day and it did fine. And that system was a 550MHz overclocked Celeron rig.
For fun, I attempted to run 3DMark2001SE on the system to see what would happen. With the driver Microsoft included with XP, it wouldn't run at default resolution. Updating to the HP-supplied driver allowed it to run. I scored 1948 3DMarks. That's a little over half the speed of the Radeon 7500 GPU and good enough for me. Project64 ran perfectly when I tested it with Mario Kart 64. And the colors... wow! I didn't expect them to be so bright.
I intend to use the computer for light 3D and CAD work since the display turned out looking better than I expected. While 16MB isn't much in the way of display RAM, it's enough to drive my display with XGA resolution while leaving a few megabytes for texture RAM.
I loaded my Proxim WiFi A/B/G card into the non-hidden mini-PCI slot and ran a spare cable/panel antenna combo I had from a Toshiba Tecra 8200 up to the top of the rear display casing where I attached the panel antenna to the portion of the case that wasn't metal. This was a far better location for the antenna than the one HP used. One small antenna hidden in the hinge portion of the system isn't going to get you far.
With drivers installed and the antenna hooked to the proper connector, I had succeeded in adding WiFi to my "new" laptop.
As for the second Mini-PCI slot, I took the modem out since I haven't needed a modem in six years. I could replace it with something and it looks like a USB 2.0 card is the most useful option. The cards are $50 and provide four USB 2.0 ports. I intend to find a way to convert the two USB ports on the rear of the system to 2.0 and feed the data lines of the original ports to internal accessories. I'm leaning toward Bluetooth and a wireless gamepad receiver. I'll keep an eye out for the card I want.
I wish the system wasn't so large, but I can't complain there. It was meant to replace my Toshiba Portege 3490CT, which I couldn't use as well as I'd have liked, owing to the cramped keyboard, 256MB RAM limit and problem with heat dissipation to locations other than my lap. The Omnibook weighs almost twice as much, but it's worth it.
Comparison:
CPU:
Omnibook: 1GHz PIII-M, 512K L2 cache, 133MHz frontside bus speed
Portege 3490CT: 700MHz Mobile PIII, 256K L2 cache, 100MHz frontside bus speed
CPU power save:
Omnibook: throttles back to 533MHz and drops core voltage
Portege 3490CT: throttles back to 500MHz with same voltage
CPU software power saving:
Omnibook: power-on-demand throttling
Portege 3490CT: duty-cycle throttling down to 133MHz speed equivalent (where I achieved 8W load)
RAM:
Omnibook: Two open slots, standard PC133 SODIMM, 1GB limit
Portege 3490CT: 128MB on-board, one slot open, rare micro SODIMM socket, 256MB limit
Display Chipset:
Omnibook: ATI Radeon M6 with 16MB DDR RAM
Portege 3490CT: S3 Savage IX with 8MB RAM
LCD display:
Omnibook: 14.1" XGA TFT LCD
Portege 3490CT: 11.3" Polysilicon XGA TFT LCD (better technology)
Keyboard:
Omnibook: full-size with normal-size keys; Pg keys, home, end, ins and del set up and away
Portege 3490CT: smaller keyboard with rectangle layout. R-shift same size as regular key, Pg keys and others in that group are at the far right of the keyboard; arrow keys are not offset
pointing devices:
Omnibook: pointing stick and touchpad; buttons side-by-side
Portege 3490CT: pointing stick; buttons one-over-another
scroll buttons:
Omnibook: up/down scroll rocker between left and right pointing stick buttons
Portege 3490CT: small buttons placed, well-spaced, side-by-side above left-click button
battery:
Omnibook: 14.8VDC 4000mAh main pack; unavailable drive bay secondary pack
Portege 3490CT: 10.8VDC 3000mAh main pack; 2lb unavailable 10.8VDC 5600mAh secondary pack
speakers:
Omnibook: stereo speakers mounted in sealed plastic enclosure behind keyboard
Portege 3490CT: mono speaker mounted free-air below right-click button in palmrest
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