I talked about this cute little CE 2.12 device in this thread:
http://www.hpcfactor.com/forums/forums/thread-view.asp?tid=10893&po...
But then the one I had stopped working, so I had one less toy to play with - until today when I got hold of a second one
(thanx, stingraze
), albeit with a dead battery. Unfortunately, my old PPP's battery seems to be dead as well now
(not a big surprise as it had been sitting for almost two years
), as the device will not run except on external power.
(I'm convinced it's the battery and not a connection issue as I tried swapping motherboards with my old PPP, getting the same result.
) I haven't had good luck with battery rebuilds
(only one successful rebuild in at least a half dozen tries
), so I hesitate to try rebuilding this one; for now I'll just use external power
(including my trusty Tekkeon universal external battery
) since I'm just experimenting with it thus far.
Anyway, I found a little fix that avoids having to close the Japanese PostPet program
(which loads automatically
) after each soft reset: just edit the value in the registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/init/Launch50 from "taskman.exe" to "explorer.exe." Then on soft reset it'll boot straight into the CE Explorer shell.
(Now if we could just figure a way to get a working Control Panel - see also my thread on the ePods. Also, just for kicks I tried creating the Desktop key in HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Control Panel, with Tile and Wallpaper values like on platform CE devices, but the blank white background was still there after a soft reset.
)
Now to look for compatible MultiMedia cards bigger than 16 MB.
(As noted in the above-linked thread, the PPP is pretty picky about these - and it can't use SD cards because they're too thick for the slot.
)
Hacking is more than just fun - I'm learning more and more about how Windows CE works. For me, CE also stands for "Continuing Education."