:) Amity 95b->98SE upgrade went great :)

As some of you know I bought a cheap Amity tablet from ebay. I love it! (I still love my hpcs, don't worry. The Amity is tiny enough for me to take with an hpc or two just in case.)

The Amity came with WinMe, which I don't like. I used the uninstall from within ME to roll back to 95b. That worked fine, a pleasant surprise.

Then after some fiddling to convince my 98SE cd to upgrade the existing OS everything installed fine. I always fret a bit at the first boot but there were no errors. My network throughput has risen 20% using the same NICs. 98SE must have a way better tcp/ip stack.

I'm tickled pink. I now have a real-mode environment for cloning disks and other similar tasks. This new Amity has USB & cardbus, my 486 Amity didn't. Now I have so many cardbus cards to choose from. Great. I also have a machine to synch with on the road if needed.

I guess my 486 Amity will become a parts machine, same housing, adapter, batteries, covers and so on.

FYI, I would have done a clean install if I had the penx/cic programs on disk, but they weren't included in the deal.

Great going .. If I may ask, how much was the amity on eBay? I may get one
EDIT: How fast is 98SE on the amity? Also, are your OS CDs the full or the upgrade?

Edited by tenjeangosi 2006-03-31 12:59 PM

It was $80, a good price IMO. Not as powerful as the $220 Fujitsus like stftclmshell got but good anyway.

ME was hopeless, 95c was fast but limited, 98se is 20% faster than 95c for networking and other stuff. My 98se cd is a full install but I tricked it into doing an upgrade.

You did an upgrade instlal, how horrific. They don't last as long as clean installs, and always suffer from wasted disk space and stability problems.

Yeah, I know but my hands were tied on this one because I don't have the cic/penx disks.

I keep expecting the big crash after each program install but so far so good.

A question. If I want the Amity Outlook to be in sync with my desktop I just copy the Outlook.pst from the desktop to the Amity? Then I have to create partnerships with my hpcs?

Done and done. Everything I need is now installed without a single crash or error, good.

So now I have a nice 2 lb. tablet for the road with 6 batteries, dc and ac chargers. I can slip the Amity into a pocket in my hpc carry bag and hardly notice it's there.

When I find a 20-40gb laptop hdd for a great price I'll drop it in and be able to carry all my important files wherever I go, and be able to sync with any hpc/palm I own on the road.

Don't you love ollder gear? The Amity cost me only $80 and I can do so much with it. There's something special about getting $3000 tablets on the cheap. So in that respect, yeah, I love that new hardware is always coming down the pipe to drive down used prices.

Isn't there anyway that you can recover the CIC installer as a download?

If you want to sync two PST's the usual way to do it is either by hand or using Binder. There are software solutions however...

If I visit the, ummm, "____z" sites, maybe. Since cic/penx is specific (or so I read) to the digitiser used by he device I'd have to get pretty lucky to find the Amity one.

It's annoying because Fujitsu, to their credit, provides downloads of these programs for all but their ancient tablets. Mitsubishi withdrew everything it seems when they disco'd the Amity.

I figured copying the .pst file was good enough and that seems to work OK. All my data seems OK after the copy.

eidt: I'm going to keep hunting tho'. I know I have about 75mb of baggage left over from the upgrade (comparing used space with a new 98se install.) and that baggage will be the death of me down the road.

Edited by wallythacker 2006-04-02 1:25 PM

I was referring to the second option.. certainly not the first. That or some sort of trial that can be activated.

Yea, the first option is an abomination to me. I trust that stuff as far as I can throw an elephant.

What I can also try are the numerous legit digitiser penx/cic downloads I collected when I got my first Amity. Time consuming but I may luck out. I *think* the Amity has a kurzwiel electromagnetic digitiser so that narrows things down.

I've watched ebay off and on for Amity cds to no avail. Two years ago an ebayer was selling new in box Amitys sans the penx/cic disks? It's like Mitsubishi pulled the disks before they wholsaled the units.

If I have to, and an Amity with the disks comes along fairly priced I'll buy it. You can never have too many spares, within reason.

There just isn't the time though to get things perfect and that bugs an O/C person like me.

I don't suppose that the official support tel numbers / email addresses will be of any use will they?

I'm waiting on an answer for an email I sent to Mitsubishi. It's been 2-3 business days so perhaps there's hope.

CIC just sent me a useless link to their site explaining I'm SOL.

I have an odd problem with an external enclosure (1394 & USB.)

If the enclosure is connected to my 1394 card it works fine.

If I connect the enclosure to a port on my USB hub the hdd is recognized and Windows says the drivers got installed and all is ready to go. But the drive doesn't show up in explorer.

If I connect my Lyra USB jukebox to a port on my USB hub Windows recognizes the device, install the drivers and I can access the drive through explorer. The same holds true for my other USB external hdds. They are seen and accessible.

My external USB hdds are USB 1.1 and the enclosure is USB 2.0 and the hub is USB 1.1 Can this be the problem? If not have you any other ideas to try?