A very interesting HP340lx

Hi, this is my first post, so feel free to correct me if I make any mistake

Long story short, I got a pretty much new HP 340lx, as far as I knew, these are pretty rare, and they were just there to clear up HP's parts stock.

From what I heard that, it is a combination of 320lx motherboard, 360lx screen and a windows CE 2.0 rom.

Mine indeed has the 360lx white backlight screen, but doesn't have the CF card slot that 320lx has? Does that mean the one I got was actually a 300lx motherboard or all 340lx has no CF card support or HP simply ran out of CF card slot parts when they built this one?

The second interesting part is, I also have a 320lx running on CE1.0, I put the 340LX windows ce2.0 rom into the 320lx, the 320lx will boot to windows ce 2.0 normally. But when I put the windows ce 1.0 rom into 340lx, it won't boot. What could be the reason behind that? they should be pretty much same right, maybe because of the screen difference?

The third problem I have is regarding the screen, the 340lx has funny display, when display black, the color is not even, my 320lx doesn't have this problem at all. maybe screen cable? it displays just fine, and full black is also fine, but when its half way to full contrast, this issue will occur. Also when I use spreedsheet, the vertical lines in the program will extend entire screen, even cross the task bar, which I don't see this issue with 320lx even with 2.0rom.

Any advice will be appreciated!

Thanks!

Hi, welcome to the forum. I don’t have answers for the other questions but I do for the CE 1.0 ROM:
Per this page https://www.hpcfactor.com/hardware/devices/54/Hewlett_Packard/340LX
The 340lx only came with Windows CE 2.0 so that would be the reason why the 1.0 ROM doesn’t work. I’m not familiar with the exact differences but the devices page here on hpcfactor lists out those models and you can compare them.
https://www.hpcfactor.com/hardware/devices/

Thanks for the info. Ya, I later found the 340lx spec page, seems CF card slot wasn't an option, maybe it was that way to push the sale of 360lx.

I understand the 360lx rom can not be used on 320lx because their hardware is different, but the 340lx rom can work on 320lx, but not other way around is very interesting. I wonder what happens in the rom that prevents the 340lx from booting a 1.0 rom.

I suspect for cost cutting reasons, the CE2.0 ROM works on both the 320,340,and maybe 360.
Maybe it was more economical in this way given economies of scale ?
I don’t have any first hand knowledge, just an educated guess.

It’s too bad you can’t try out CE1.0 though. It is basically a beta release of CE but it was interesting to see how it worked when I had my Velo 1. That said, 2.0 and especially 2.11 really make CE a lot more useful.

Thanks for the reply. I do have a 320lx that runs original CE1.0 tho, so it's a win win to the 320lx, it's just interesting that the 340lx rom can work on 320lx but not the other way round.

I agree the economical reason, also if they removed the that part purposely, they probably not only cut cost but also want make way for 360lx, because no CF card slot is a real deal killer.