An experiment

I picked up a broken Compaq C-Series 2010C from eBay for a couple of bucks recently to try an experiment. Would the ROM, which for that model is OS 2.11, work in a Compaq C-Series 810, which normally runs OS 2.0? I just finished swapping ROMs and yes, it does work. I’ve ended up with a monochrome H/PC running Windows CE Pro from two AA batteries.

Kind of neat.

Rick


Edited by Richard Plume 2012-11-11 12:53 AM

Cool. What results did you get on the 2010c with the 810 ROM?

Now that is very interesting! Is there anything that isn't working? Ports (IR)/shortuct keys/ActiveSync etc?

What is the battery life like? given that it is processing for 8/16-bit colour from the driver, it could be a bit haphazard.

I've added this as a note to the C810's D&S entry.

When viewing a color image, how well does it differentiate the color image on the gray scale lcd? Snapshot perhaps?

Some further observations on the ROM swap:

The 810 ROM works fine in the 2010C, and it works in colour.

What do you give up/gain with the ROM swap?

Obviously you’re going to OS2.11 from OS2.0 so you do gain the H/PC Pro versions of MS Pocket Access, Inkwriter and Voice Recorder. In addition, you also gain CIC’s QuickNotes 2.5 which Compaq has placed in ROM. This is a major upgrade to the 2.0 version in the Compaq 810 ROM. In Control Panels, you also gain a Hot Keys Definition program, which works very well.

You lose Compaq’s Voice Memo (cancelled out by the Pro’s Voice Recorder), QuickNotes 2.0 (cancelled out by the Pro’s 2.5 version (a much better program)), Pocket BizCalc and CIC’s SpellCheck (for those of you who have never heard or used this, I consider it a major loss. The program is only found in Compaq’s OS2.0 ROM or on a CD produced by Hitachi for some of their H/PCs. It was never released to the general public for sale. Years ago I took it from the 810’s ROM and put it on my MobilePro 700, where it is in constant use. I found the rare Hitachi CD a few years ago so now have an easily installable version. The program is a spell checker that works across all CE programs that use text, as well as doing macros (yeah email signatures!!!) and documents stats (yeah wordcount!!!). Unfortunately it does not work on 2.11 machines.)

ActiveSync 3.8 works great. I’ve installed sixxac’s PowerTime to monitor battery usage (I’ll post battery stats after I’ve used it for a while). I’ve also synched a calendar entry as well as a contact entry.

I’ve tried saving a Word file onto both a CF card (256MB Viking card in a Simple Technology PCMCIA adapter) and a 1.2GB SanDisk PCMCIA card. Both reading and writing worked fine.

I’ll post more after further testing.

Rick

Edited by Richard Plume 2012-11-11 11:27 PM

A couple of snapshots...

Rick







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This is so cool. What a shame that the Sharp Mobilon didn't produced an actual 2.11 machine (other than the lawsuit chip that I've never found) that Mobilon 4100 could crib from, just as you've done here.

I'm interested in all your results, but very much would like to hear your testing of battery life.

Jake

Edited by Jake 2012-11-12 4:21 PM

At the moment PowerTime reports it's been operational for 40 minutes with 94 per cent power left. It's been in suspend mode for 1 day, 1 hour and 6 minutes. The batteries being used are Duracell Ultra Power cells. Both were fresh as was the backup button cell.

So far I've synched it twice, tested all the programs and written and read a couple of files to and from both CF and PCMCIA memory cards. The backlight was also tested for a few minutes. All of this was done on battery power.

It should be noted that this 810 has 20MB of internal RAM, not the normal 8MB, which also may make the batteries drain faster.

Rick

Edited by Richard Plume 2012-11-12 7:35 PM

Thanks for the follow-up. Is that 20MB of RAM from your own surgery, or were there actual 810 models that came with the RAM or an additional RAM chip (like the Velo 1)?

Jake

It's actually a Compaq upgrade. They produced a 16MB chip that, when combined with the onboard 4MB, produced a 20MB machine. It's a good thing they produced it as the C-Series machines don't have a CF slot, just one PCMCIA slot.

Rick