How bad is the "hinge defect" on the Psion Teklogix Pro Netbook?

I've seen a few of these for sale from usedhandhelds and they look good, but for the broken hinge. However, I'm just not sure how stable the screen can be with only the one hinge holding it up....
Anyone who has one of these systems with the bad hinge care to comment? Any way to fix or is it not that bad a problem?

I can't speak for the PRO but I can speak for the 3 and 5 which I have several.

The plastics on both become very brittle over time.

If that machine already has a broken hinge, to me, it would be a symptom of bad plastics.

It is really a Psion in name only; I mean it is nothing like other Psion-branded devices: it is a 800x600 sub-notebook running Win CE 4.2 rather than a palmtop with EPOC OS. That's what interests me, it seems like a pretty weird device compared to other Psions I've seen.

It's kinda weird that they have 6 for sale that are all missing the same hinge, isn't it? (that's right- it says MISSING, as in REMOVED, not broken)

Personally I'd cough up the extra $40 and get the one that has both hinges installed. ^_^

Edited by thenzero 2023-09-25 1:31 AM

What's the screen cable status with the Netbook? As fragile as the Psion 5*?

Jake

FWIW, I have one of the Netbook Pro's from UsedHandhelds. Got it a few months ago and mine is good, no broken hinge.

Contact Biba there and ask if he has any left with hinges in good condition. I've found he's very good to deal with.

Best,

Mark

Seconded, and also note that both of the ebay listings mentioned (with and without left hinge haha!) are from usedhandhelds.

I decided to go with one with intact hinges. If you search around the interwebs, you can find some old discussion of the problem back in the noughties, so those hinges broke even when they were new. Hopefully I won't have to deal with that for a while. I'm always thrilled to expand my version hell: this will be my first Win CE 4.2 device. Looking forward to exploring yet more ways Microsoft can be incompatible with itself.

I never had a real EPOC Psion, but a diving buddy of mine was always complaining about newer devices and pining away over his dead Psion....

Psion has an absolute first-rate word processor and PDA accoutrements (as seen in the CE Agenda spinoff). Plus, a great amount of software. Email, Opera browsing is where it doesn't make it into the modern world. But if you're willing to work in a sealed environment, it's remarkable (except, perhaps, for the muddy screens of the 5's).

PsiWin still works with everything (including Outlook sync) except file browsing, so Java Psion Link makes up for that.

Jake

Willing to work in a sealed enviro? I think I am beginning to prefer it. Storage is cheap and plentiful and it's good get up and walk around.

As for networking, I just don't see the point of browsers on tiny screens: the novelty of reading headlines in bed on my Zaurus SL-5500 wore off quickly in 2003. I still don't view anything without a proper keyboard and screen as a real computer. Android and iOS have made passive activities like video watching less of a hair shirt, but these OSes are stifling to use for any length of time. Everything is a store, there's no way to automate tasks or program, and the solution to every problem is buy another app. Sad, really.

Anyway, looks like this device has an easy battery to recell:

https://linux-7110.sourceforge.net/howtos/netbook_new/LIbattery/LIbattery.html

Since there are 3 batteries in there, I'm going to try using a spot welder this time.

btw, the local headshop seems to be a good source of 18650s: "3000 mah" Imrens work just fine in my 720/620.

Eh, there are lots of other things to do with networking such as....

checking email
accessing BBSs over telnet
accessing your Linux box over SSH
grabbing a file from your Windows share/FTP server/whatever
uploading the latest revision of your website/HTML
....etc

Agreed. Also https://lynx.scramworks.net/ in telnet allows actual browsing to pretty much all sites. So a 2G/Edge infrared connection can work, but in the States, harder and harder to find.

Jake

That's neat.

I have different devices with weak hinges of portable devices. My strategy:

- Avoiding opening and closing
- Avoiding adjusting screen angle
- Packing in a hard case for storage/travel so the device is not smushed like a sandwich

A few years ago, the hinge in my dell laptop broke at the metal wing which is screwed into the chassis. I cleaned/roughed up the surfaces & glued it to the chassis with some some Loctite adhesive (would have preferred 2-part epoxy but didn't have any). That has held up fine.

There are a lot of risks with repair: the adhesive destroys the plastics, the adhesive fails, etc.

However, there is risk with a slightly broken, sticking, or misaligned hinge. That puts a lot of pressure on the entire gizmo and can lead to catastrophic results.

If the hinge fails catastrophically, it could destroy the device's screen, case, motherboard, components.

Yeah, adhesive disasters are sometimes worse than the original problem. I got a "for parts" 620LX that someone had glued. They'd lost one of the hinge screws and tried to use glue. The stuff had oozed onto the display cable, shorted some of its traces, which then blew up some caps on the screen's controller? board. Fixing that screen is far down on my list of rainy-day activities, although I did get a working keyboard, motherboard, and rom card out of it.


Re: networking,

POP3/IMAP/<insert encrypty horrible new thing here> email is such a pain...I usually just leave it all on the server and SSH in or use webmail. As almost no one I know uses it for personal communication anymore, it's just spam/work mail anyway.

I just can't get into BBSes. I've tried, but they seem so limited compared to something like SDF's unix shell. That's really all I use anymore and I don't feel comfortable with telnet so I would have to telnet to a local raspberry pi and then SSH into the site. Just seems like a pain. But then I am perforce a minimalist mostly interested in offline computing where power and network infrastructure don't work that well when they work at all. The rural South US is rapidly turning into the 3rd world....


Edited by hassilon 2023-10-01 2:37 PM