Jornada 820 and ARCHOS

Jornada 820 and ARCHOS

The arrival this week of the UsedHandhelds CD and my current failure to find the 16Mb memory upgrade which was made for the Jornada 820, prompted me to try out this Clik driver and see what transfer possibilities there were.

I've just finished installing Windoze 7 64bit OEM to one of our HP Tablets, which was very smooth by the way. Windows 7 is, in my view, rightly held to be the true successor to XP.

Now it's time to get some Jornada archiving done to a 3.5" external drive, recently partitioned into two... for the Win98/Toshiba limitation of 137Gb per partition. The Tosh is way too slow for archiving, so the Tablet will get the hard work, with the old Tosh getting to do any Activesync sessions which cannot otherwise be avoided.
Even at modern speeds you must know how boring archiving can be... Windoze dialogue box, invariably wildly inaccurate, throws up times like 4 hours and fifty minutes for this transfer of 8,564 files etc.
So whilst this is in progress, I installed the 1.12 Clik driver on the 820 and tried something which has been at the back of my mind for a while.

We have tried viewing movies on Jornadas, XDAiiS phones, and HTC Ameo phones. None of them have been what you'd call watchable, even when you have gone through the lists of possible codec saves in those applications... which promise to provide a miniature viewing experience. The solution for us, is a gadget called an ARCHOS. Basically an IDE hard disc drive mounted on a 4" screen, and placed into a fairly stout metal casing. I don't believe that the screen is LCD, it seems too sharp for that.



The Archos device, in recording mode, also converts ANY video which can be output to it via RCA cables... yellow(video), Red(Rhs Sound), White(Lhs sound)... to modern AVI, or some call them MP4 files.

To give a simple example, it easily converts (albeit in real time only) our ancient Laser Discs, played on our equally ancient Pioneer LD player.
Not only that, but you get a really sharp easily-viewed picture, which is perfectly lip-synchronised with the sound track. Not something you always get with the convertors... and we must've tried them all, from inboard video capture cards on pcs to the once commonplace pcmcia cards, and current usb devices.
The Archos beats them all.

I bought a kind of job lot of Archos, cameras, batteries, cases and bits, which was being sold off on eBay. It was being sold more cheaply because it was really an offshoot of the Archos system, for police.
One of the alternate uses to which these Archos units were put, with a headcam, was to mount on police and provide video evidence, if required.

The ARCHOS was given a slightly altered operating system... which itself is (I think) a derivative of Linux. The whole package was then sold as The Cylon.

These units came fitted with the maximum drive size at that time, which was 100Gb in a standard IDE 2.5" hard drive package.

The OS on the Cylon packages, used by police, is a sort of cut-down version of the GUI OS and interface used on commercial units.
Popular opinion at the time (and since) was to avoid Cylon Archos units, as they were too restricted.
The main complaint seemed to be that there was no file manager app and therefore access to the files on the Archos itself was unnecessarily curtailed. I dug around a bit and found that what was declared to be a Help app also had most of the functions of a file manager anyway.
I think that because people believed the flile manager was absent, they also felt that MP3 files could not be played... as they can on the commercial version. But clicking on an mp3 in the Help'/File manager got the MP3 app to run.





On the Cylon screen you are presented with Video, Video Corder, Help, and Setup.





On the commercial version you have Video, Music, Photo, Browser, Resume (video playing) Video Corder, Scheduler, AdioCorder, and Help.
Evidently the home orifice, who approved the Cylon's use and who are supposed to run the police here, didn't want them playing their own videos and MP3s.

Archos need a special adaptor plug, which is supplied with the RCA cable necessary to go from the Archos to your TV or DVD etc. They still have these on Amazon and occasionally on eBay.
The designation of the 100Gb and the 30Gb capacity unit is Archos 500. The 30Gb form factor is similar, but the 30Gb uses a new form factor hard drive to me... it's is about as wide as a 2.5” drive, but it is only half as long. There is a 60Gb model in the range as well.

These units are no longer supported or produced by Archos, but that is something we are surely used to in the Jornada community.

I recommend them as the best way I ever found for viewing full-length movies, where it is inappropriate perhaps to have laptop or maybe a mobile phone. You can use headphones with them, or those awfull little bud things. The Archos has it's own speaker built-in, which is acceptable for rendering the sound from most converted movies.

If you have a stack of VHS cassettes which are starting to oxidise, then an Archos might help you out there too.

One caveat I will make, is that often through use, the control panels on the Archos unit may not be very sensitive. They are actually bubble membranes, not in rubber, but that celluloid used for internal ribbon cables. And they fatigue more easily than they were intended to.
We found that an investment of a few more pounds in purpose-built remote control units for them, got around all of our early problems with controls no longer working.



You might be asking by now, precisely where the Jornada 820 gets into this.

The Archos units have two forms of usb. One is a proprietary type and standard usb cable plugs will not fit into it. It is used for the headcam, which plugs into both usb connectors at the same time. The other however, is a standard usb 2. The necessary cable is shown here, with the usb port for connection to your pc here on the left.



The Jornada 820 has it's own usb 1 port. Previously only any real use if you wanted to use a mouse.
This type of early port generally requires any device that is to be connected, to be self powered, at the very least, or a card reader. And after that, you may still need a driver. The Clik driver, in it's 1.12 incarnation, seems to fill the bill.

I can “see” mp3s and AVIs stored on the Archos from the '820. I have copied cab files across to the Archos from the pc, and installed items. I can play mp3 files (in TCPMP) on the J820, which are stored on the Archos.



We get an odd name for the drive... using characters from the other end of the font perhaps... but I do get access to the files.

QF 08/09/11

That's really interesting, thanks for writing that
Seeing people write *anything* about Jornada 820s is already rare. I've been looking into getting one since with PersonalJava it would be possible to create apps for it (I imagine porting a twitter client to it and making the device to some degree more useful again!)

Excellent info and very good pics. Interesting that the 820 see that device as an external storage drive. I've done the same thing on my MP900C, that is hooked up an external USB drive with a ton of movies on it and watched them on the 900...

...but I would never have thought that the old 820 would have that capability. Very cool.

And it sounds like those Archos units are made for acquiring and saving video in a simple and easy manner.

I'm curious as to the frame rate and the video size however...how well does it refresh the screen. How large would an hour and a half movie be in byte size...any ideas? I know using DVDCatalyst that I can optimize the file to fit my Mobilepro...and it works fantastic for that. And I can set the refresh rate to optimize playback as well. But it takes a while to do it's thing...and an Archos direct recording would be so much easier I would think.

The "odd characters" are the default name assigned to the drive by the Clik! driver. You can change the name in the Clik Tools applet in Start -> Programs.

Thanks for all of your replies. And Mr Hawley for the recent dload that you put up.
I'm still installing Softmaker Office 2004 from that magic UsedHandhelds CD (whilst the archiving is in progress) and perhaps then I'll get chance to look at the contents of your downloads in more detail. Next up is a web page on the Compaq C Series though.

On looking at my reply and your responses... on the page, so to speak... I do hope that I did not give the impression that the J820 could actually play any of these movies. That is well outside it's ability. The processor alone is probably more than incapable of the processing required. The Archos with the J820 is just for storage/transfer. I do not believe, even if we were to find the memory expansions, that the Jornada 820 would cope with any of these files or processes. Seeing a J72x try to chug through a movie, even one converted to mobile phone codecs, is bad enough. The 820 just produces dark pastel almost-stills, against the soundtrack... which it appears to be able to deal with... just.

Now, Rich Hawley... My inexpert answer to your query regarding frame rates etc. is this...

Take any converted DVD... we always used a free app called Fairuse Wizard 2... it converts any DVD (in real time) to AVI (MP4). Get it here...

http://fairusewizard.com/lang_en/fairuse_wizard_dvd_divx_xvid_backup_tool_light_edition.html

So it's no quicker than using the ARCHOS, but then it doesn't tie up the computer either. On the PC you need one other software component for most DVDs, called AnyDVD. This is a very clever app which sits in your toolbar and "looks" at any dvd you might insert. Rather than offend any sensibilities which folks may have regarding these issues on here, instead I give you this link to the official AnyDVD site. There are two versions of this app, one covers HD video, which we apparently don't use. The thing is very clever and seldom fails. As a bonus, if you play any commercial DVDs through it in your PC, then it gives you the option to strip out all the annoying messages and go direct to the menu.

http://www.slysoft.com/en/anydvd.html

ARCHOS does not deal with MKV files. These are even more highly compressed than AVI (which to me was originally an ancient microsoft video codec, and in no way capable of dealing with files over 2Mb, never mind Gb). Another item you might like to include on your freebie shop if you are playing DVDs from your laptop is VLC. This is a free player. God knows how they did it, but this can on occasion actually play movies which are still inside the RAR files that you might have downloaded. There is even a plugin for it here

http://www.shapeshifter.se/code/vlc-unrar/

, which I did not know about before. But the basic player has been able to play movies which are still inside RAR files for some time. Even if you only get part of the movie in only a few of the RAR files, sometimes it can play them.

Get VLC here

http://www.videolan.org/vlc/

or from a Google on VLC.

Finally for your PC playing, the best free codec pack comes from K-Lite here

http://www.codecguide.com/download_kl.htm

It downloads and installs with it's own player, imaginatively entitled Media Player, which is nevertheless a pretty good player in it's own right.
The site explains what codecs are and more importantly, why you might like to install them.

OK, so you've downloaded your movie and once you've un-rar'd it then it turns out that it is an AVI.
A test run under the above mentioned (K-lite or VLC) media players and it plays ok.
All you need do now is transfer it to the ARCHOS.
There is a free conversion detector program I recall now entitled Videoready, which detects (on your pc) any AVIs which will NOT play on the ARCHOS... and I quote

"VideoReady: Software for your windows pc to quickly scan all your video files and see in green the ones
that will work fine on your Archos and in red the ones that have certain aspects of their video or audio
codec which is not compatible. Quickly see your AVIs which have AC3 audio, then you can convert those AVI's
to have mp3 audio, that only takes a few minutes per movie.. "

There's another software freebie for the Archos called Archosoft and with it "ArchoSoft: converts text-to-JPG, RSS feeds to JPG and weather feeds to JPG files which you can then sit
and read on your AV500 or Gmini500 device using the image viewer."
Never really found a use for that one.

There are various add-ons you can get... such as "the docking pod"... which is supposed to act as a sort of interface turnpike, but again having tried one we never found a use for it really.
Except... yes we did find one use for it... I connected one of those Chinese external LED enhanced night/day cameras to the supplied wireless transmitter and we needed the pod to get the Archos into the mix. You'd think that the 100Gb wouldn't last very long if it was recording sound/video from such a camera, but it is quite surprising.
However the cable (mentioned above), and the remote control (our 100Gb units have evidently had a hard life in the hands of police and the buttons are iffy) are the most-used addons, by us anyway.

There it is, still on Amazon, as I expected...

With that cable, you simply connect the three plugs into the matching sockets on your DVD or TV, or in our case the Laser Disc player. The convention follows the standard for video cams etc... Yellow for Composite Video, and Red/White for stereo sound.

In general, a 90 minute video takes up between 650 and 700 Mb. So on a standard 100Gb Archos you could probably accommodate around 100 standard videos.

Now as to quality and frame rates... I never actually bothered to find out. I seem to recall that the standard was around 30 frames per second.
In all honesty, I doubt you'd bother transferring the file to your MobilePro. We have a couple of 900cs and it never crossed my mind.
The quality is difficult for me to quantify. An example might be a rarity like Meet The Hollowheads. Not available on DVD for a long time, and expensive now that it is.
We got the LD donkey's years ago. Someone wrote about this sort of twisted modern-day Addams Family on a site that we frequented, and it prompted me to convert it.
Now that film is all pastel colours, to highlight the dystopian nightmare-world they live in. And the transfer by Archos was not bad, but not really DVD grade. But you see LDs had quality standards too and this one was not very high standard, as I recall.
On the other hand when I converted the outstanding movie "The Duelists", with Harvey Keitel and Keith Carradine, it came over (to me) as dvd grade... and DVD grade on the Archos screen at that.

I've tried taking still captures from it so you can see the results, but with little success. On the 30Gb one here in front of me, I have stored some converted (to avi) episodes of a tv series that we took a brief look at. We didn't like it much, so it is due for deletion, but the quality is par for the course I am inadequately trying to describe. And whilst I was looking through the files a neuron fired, and I called up the secondary control panel...mostly used for additional functions. In there is an info option and the numbers may give you an idea...

Type AVI Mbytes 549
Duration 57' 11"
Resolution 624x352 Codec MPG4
Bitrate 1210Kb.s
Audio Mp3 132Kb.s 48000Hz Stereo.

We got the standard stiff case for the 30Gb in with the lot. It folds back over to make a sort of easel, with the Archos as the canvas.
If I sit it on my chest whilst lounging back on the sofa, it works very well. If you hold it as you would a book, it works well too. The internal speaker is usually loud enough for the audio track to be heard easily.
You get poor viewing if you try to see it from a angle much below the horizontal... but oddly enough not above it. Holding the screen at right angles to you, if you tilt the screen with the top of the screen going backwards then the picture darkens and you see the ghosts. However, viewing from the side... even to quite an acute angle... seems to work pretty well.

The only success we had with converting video to run on mobile phones, or indeed hand-helds for that matter, was by using one of those clever converters and selecting one of the mobile phone options. At the arrival of the Archos, I gave up trying for these conversions as they simply took away the reason for doing so.

I do hope that this covers most of what you wanted to know. Needless to say LMK if I've missed anything out.

I realise that a 100Gb drive on a Jornada 820 is something in the realms of sledgehammers cracking nuts, but there may yet be possibilities with the 72x series. Ages ago I bought a CF 1 card which adds a USB 1 interface to CE devices. I don't think I ever got a 72x to actually use it, or see it, even with the drivers installed. But if it can be made to work... perhaps with the Iomega drivers...

I confess that I did not try the Archos with the MobilePros. But I will try it today. I fully expect the lady Cmonex's OS (which is aboard them both) and the MobilePro itself, will cope at least as well as the Jornada 820s did.

PS Just found these specs in an eBay listing for a 30Gb unit...

Features:

- 4in (10.2cm) screen with 10.2cm visible screen size.

- 262,000 colours and 16:9 screen format.

- Record directly from your TV, VCR, DVD player, cable box or satellite receiver.

- Can store up to 130 hours of video, 85 movies1, 15 000 songs or 300,000 photos

- MPEG-4 SP with B-Frames (compatible with DivX® 4.0 and 5.0) with stereo sound. Near DVD quality up to 720x480 @ 30 f/s (NTSC), 720x576 @ 25 f/s (PAL), AVI file format. WMV9 (including protected files) up to 352x288 @ 30 f/s, and 800 KBit/s.

- JPEG (except progressives) or BMP. Download photos from computer through USB 2.0 port. Transfer photos from digital camera through USB Host port.

- Record audio analog source in WAV or WAV ADPCM and playback MP3, WMA (including protected contents) and WAV music files.

- Timer record facility to make scheduled recordings.

- Voice recorder with built in microphone.

- Built in speaker.

- USB 2.0 high-speed device, compatible USB 1.1, PC & Mac. USB Host port compatible Mass Storage Device

- Battery Life: Up to 15 hours for music. Up to 4.5 hours for video on built-in LCD. Removable battery

- Size (H) 7.6, (W) 12.4, (D) 1.8cm.

- Weight 0.256kg.



QF 09-09-11

Mr Kpour, I'd be glad to test any apps that you create on the 820s, and I do hope you get one soon. eBay offers only one at the moment. We were very lucky in finding first one which is clearly low mileage and still boxed (still has the blue side screen sticker on it too), and a second which is likewise but without the box. Both PSUs function, and both batteries hold charge very well.

Mind you one thing which is puzzling is the number of batteries offered on eBay for these. I presume these are sold with the idea of you splitting the casing on the one you have. But when I queried it, the oriental seller said that if I had to ask the question then it was clearly an unsuitable item for me to buy. Yeah, right.

While I think of it... when you get your 820, whilst you are experimenting, you might like to get an oridinary pair of tweezers. These are absolutely vital for removing the twin-backup-battery circuit board undamaged, whilst you are doing a hard re-set.

I have not bothered with the J820 and web pages yet. We had to change our WiFi from WEP to WPA2, and the old network which the Jornadas and the Cisco 340 and 350 cards used pretty well is therefore off air. I am thinking of resurrecting just the router, for local Jornada/Ameo use only (no web connection) at some time in the future.
And, whilst on that subject, I only discovered afterwards... isn't it always the case... that we need not have moved from our WEP WiFi at all.

The WEP protocols have been cracked... well and truly. So much so that they might as well be transparent. In fact you can dload WEP cracking kits from a large number of places.

However... yes however... if you had your WEP WiFi set up (as we did) to not only use WEP but to also use the WEP client Table system which invariably accompanies it, then you already had security which was as good as WPA and WPA2... if not better.
All routers which did/do WEP had the facility for you to enter the MAC number from each of your devices (the 340/350 Cisco cards in our case) into a table. This meant that no matter what trick you tried to log on to your wifi... WEP crack or not... unless you actually knew a Mac number from that table, then you were not going to get in.

I finally got a genuine microsoft Entertainment Pack 2 disc, after many trials and tribulations. You know, the one for the Jornada 72x.
But I had to get a frequent flyer to the US, who's daughter lives there, to let me buy it on Amazon.com and have it sent to her in the US. Then our frequent flyer picked it up on one of his visits and brought it here. No sellers over there, where it is still available, would sell us a copy and then send it to us... including Amazon.
You'd think it was a strategic weapon... like the old Prime Anomaly solution used to be.
So that is going on today, via the old Tosh 4010cdt and Activesync.
It should work even better in the enlarged screen of the 820.
And then little but vital things, like associate from one of the Powertoys packs.

QF 09-09-11

Edited by quinbus_flestrin 2011-09-09 9:37 AM

Results:

Connecting your MobilePro to the Archos via USB gets an immediate recognition of the device as "Hard Disc" in the MobilePro system.
Now I tried transferring an AVI (around 440Mb), and the MobilePro choked on this then (eventually) stopped with the Error Message "Can't Transfer/Copy this File", or something very like that. Tried with Total Commander too... same result. Other,, more normal sized files were copied successfully across without a murmur.

I then copied the offending colour file across to the Archos from the pcmcia card, via one of our HP laptops under Windows 7, which was successful. It also got me to test (and automatically install the drivers) a Chinese ExpressCard adaptor for CF 1 and 2 cards for us. Been meaning to do that for ages. It works fine incidentally.

Then I tried using a favourite test set of files that I made for another job, which uses the B/W thriller movie HellDrivers, starring my late mum's heart throb Stanley Baker, and William Hartnell was a villain as he usually was in those days (1st Doctor Who), and a seriously young Sean Connery. This set consists of the original theatrical trailer, the movie itself as a standard avi, and the movie also encoded for mobile phone, as an avi.

Using Media Player... or TCPMP with additions? on the MobilePro, they all staggered their way along at predictably dire rates.
Now the Archos performance increases usually if you connect the mains transformer/charger. That still produced results which you would not watch... and bear in mind that Helldrivers is B/W as well. The mobile phone encoded trailer did play without interruption, but the frame loss was very noticeable.

If you view the Archos as what it is, a purpose-built personal video player and recorder, and then look at the MobilePro performance with the same material, I am confident that you will give up trying (as we did) with the handheld computers. Even our Ameos, on Windows Mobile 6 and with on-board microdrives, do not cope with video anywhere near as well as these Archos. And of course what handheld computer can record to avi, in real time, from more or less any commonplace video device... TV, DVD player, even a Laser Disc player?

Now having said all of that, I have a copy of The Beatles A Hard Days Night in a really ancient set of MOV type files, which we bought years and years ago. Now MOV files used to be something to do with SoundBlaster sound cards (and VideoBlaster capture cards) in the day, but I think they are now an all-but-forgotten video file format. And the MobilePro is just now playing those files, full screen, and with the sound and songs... no hiccups.

So the Archos works reasonably well with the MobilePro, which recognises it's presence without the need for additional drivers... at least without any additional drivers to those which the lady Cmonex may have put in. But then reflect upon the fact that the Archos usually requires no additonal encoding or downsizing to play most AVI movies.

QF 09-09-11

Thank you very much for this excellent overview on Archos and its uses together with Jornada 820. I've found it extremely interesting. Thank you for writing it.

At a certain point in your narration I've found an intrigueging piece of information about the CF to USB adapter for Jornada 72x. I'd like not to be off-topic, but I am very interested to hear more about that - brand, model no, sourcing, price, etc, although I understand that was for you a long time ago, so you might not recall all the details. Thank you very much.

Hi arlex,

I was perhaps equally as intrigued as you evidently are, by the simple fact of this device. The device was of course, long out of date, even as I pursued it. In the final event, I believe (at this remove) that multiples came offered for sale quite sudddenly. Possibly some long forgotten stock was unearthed. I cannot quite recall the exact circumstances now. A box duly arrived in the post, about the size of one of those old fashioned sound card boxes. Inside was a CF card, and the flying lead to usb, as well as a CD holding the necessary drivers, and a brochure.

I do recall trying to get a 720 to use it, despite the necessary requirement of it's being mounted in a pcmcia to cf adaptor.

The specific detail that you will require is still here, on the original web page that I hunted down at the time, after learning of the very existence of such a device.

Unfortunately I only found this page after finding one of these devices offered for sale.

Had I turned up this page before, I might well have passed on the purchase.

As you can see, the compatibility table was encouraging, for use with our Jornadas.

System Requirements

Physical Requirements
CF TypeII slot or PC card slot with CF TypeII adapter.
*Notice: CF slot must support CF I/O function.
OS
Pocket PC 2000/ 2002/ 2003/ 2003 SE <---------####
Windows Mobile 5.0

Extra information
[Linux Zaurus]
Free ware driver for Linux Zaurus is available at Mr.Humorum's Page. If you have any questions or need any help, please ask the website. We can not answer anything.

http://www.ratocsystems.com/english/products/CFU1U.html

You will note that my CF device, was even at the time I found it, declared on this page to be "discontinued".
And at no place on the page (or it's successor) is the Jornada 72x offered as compatible.

Following the link to the successor...

http://www.ratocsystems.com/english/products/CFU2U.html

Since this device seems to be current and still available, you might then think that there may have been some way... but if there was, it eluded me.

I always meant to try it in something later like a MobilePro 900c, but when I actually acquired one, it seemed somewhat superfluous to the one already there.

The only devices we have to hand which use Windows Mobile 5 are a couple of HTC XDAiis Windows Mobile phones. One of which I still use as a phone.
However these devices work exclusively with SD cards, and not high capacity ones at that. (ie. capacity limit 2Gb).
There is no simple way that I could get a CF card into this mix.

Likewise the HTC Ameos, which run Windows mobile 6.1, do actually use CF cards in the specific form of an 8Gb microdrive... fitted internally, and there is no way (having seen the movie) that I really want to try the take-down on one of those... just to get at the CF interface.

QF 10-09-11

Addendum

I've just tried the RATOC CFU1U with a clean Jornada 720. The Compaq drivers install encouragingly normally, and are registered by the uninstall system.
Connecting the card via a CF1/2 pcmcia adaptor to the Archos throws up the "Enter a Name for this driver" box, which refuses to react to any of the driver dll names, with our without the dll suffix.
Indeed after an initial second or so, the Archos screen claims that the usb line has been dropped... so it must see it briefly nevertheless.

I've emailed Ratoc, but at this late date I doubt they'll be interested. The driver CD also has Dell, Toshiba, and Fujitsu drivers as well as the Compaq.
But I suspect they'd be even less likely to work.

It was at the back of my mind to try the enhanced USB drivers for the 820 etc... those Iomega click drivers, or even the RATOC CFU2 drivers.
But then it would be unlikely I suppose, that they would drive through a pcmcia adapter as well. They'll expect an on-board USB like the 820's, I think.
Just to be sure, I repeated the same tests with a loaded 728 without any success.
I've dloaded the CFU2 drivers notwithstanding, and perhaps I'll try them at a later stage.

QF 10-09-11

Hi quinbus_flestrin!

Thank you for the detailed story, now I see how things are. Indeed back in 2006 I've read on this forum about the Ratoc CF to USB card and I was living with the impression of full compatibility with Jornada 72x, while about buying the card itself I thought it was only a matter of availability and price. But according to your experience, I was wrong....

Although I used to visit the Ratoc page in that time I did not save a copy, but I still have the impression that for OS compatibility the list was longer to include also HPC2000. It appears that my neurons have stored a wrong impression though.

On the other hand, somewhere in a corner of my mind there was the hope that there is another solution to put USB on Jornada that you might have found besides this one from Ratoc Systems. I recall an adapter from Billionton has been waved creating a very high excitement on this forum.....but at the end it turned not to be real. Too bad.....

It is always a pleasure to read your posts. Thanks again very much!

Another day at the archiving and wondering if I'll ever bother with this stuff again. There must be huge numbers of duplicates and older versions to sort through, but at least it's under Windows 7 now. All 86 and a half Gb of it. There's all sorts of stuff in there. We had an Acer n30 once and there is pocket pc stuff in there for that... and trials for the PA 2400W Cassiopeia... and a J548 which came my way... mp3s that I use on a J720 via a sub-woofer in my workshop, audiobooks, ebooks... and I don't know what else.

So... during those ildle moments... things like this Ratoc card sometimes act like a grain of grit in the otherwise allegedly smooth?? machine with me...

The good news is... from reading an old post (2006) on this site... which was incidentally thrown up in a Google, I gleaned that someone had got some results by using 2002 drivers with this card. I've never been loth to proifit from the knowledge of my peers, so I went and got the 2002 Compaq drivers out and sent them into a set up 728. Then I got the CF1/CF2 pcmcia adapter and set the ratoc card in it. The whole thing going into the 728' pcmcia slot, and the Archos switched on. This is where we usually get the demand for the driver name and the Archos does an about-turn on the USB Hard Drive connection message.

No such demand was forthcoming on the J728, and the Archos HD message stayed on.
I really thought it was going to work. Then a message came up asking if I wanted to format the USB drive, and I noticed that an icon had appeared in the File Explorer, imaginatively entitled "USB Disk".
Not wanting to total the system files on the Archos, of course I said No. And clicking on that USB Disk folder gets you a blank screen. But it's more than I ever got before, using the drivers that came with that card.
The 728 is running ExDrive, and I wonder perhaps if this is fighting with the ratoc drivers. Maybe worth a try on a clean machine.

This place is amazing, and so are the people in it.
We used to get very clever Rom cookers on the HTC forums... and some of them behaved as though they were celebrity chefs too... when I was trying to get the Ameos to do what the Archos now does, but I swear I never ran across any of them to compare with the peer group here. Some of those folks refused to even answer newbie questions. Giving the distinct impression that it was "above" them. When in actual fact the thing that really was above them was their egoes.

I've now given Softmaker Office a good try on the J820 with a letter to our MP, early this morning. It's got that annoying key delay when you type.
Memory allocation seems ok, at the generally recommended three times the remaining free storage allocation, so I can't really blame the lack of it.
The system is not overladen, like I tend to do on 728s, ('cos we can get away with it) either.
And when it's runnning, there is still a tidy bit of memory left on the right hand side. I may try jettisoning (essential) memory resident stuff like Resinfo and MS Mute.
But the same thing works fine on a loaded (overladen?) 728, all day long.

If you don't already have a copy of that cd from usedhandhelds, then nip on to eBay and get one before they run out.
The original offer we saw on here was with a wifi card, which with a slack handful of Aironets (340 and 350s), was a bit silly for us.
But the eBay entry is just for the disc on it's own.

QF 11-09-11



Edited by quinbus_flestrin 2011-09-11 6:07 PM