Workpad z50 Questions (performance and P' IE)

Hello,

I thought I'd chime in here with a few questions.

I recently got hold of a Workpad z50 with 48MB RAM, 340MB MicroDrive, mint condition overall, with the install CDs, power adapter and sync cable for £25. (A bargain in my book!)

I note in the review on this site a few 'optimisations' are noted to make the z50 a little snappier:

"There are one or two tweaks that you can make to it to substantially improve performance through general use (which HPC:Factor will document in the CESD for reference of z50 users)."

I haven't been able to find this document. Am I being blind or is not yet available?

Much of this will be the DSTN screen and I only have the Workpad really for writing on the move when I don't have my Velo on me (my first, and long suffering H/PC!)

Also I have applied the H/PC Pro SP1 and did a soft reset, is that enough or does it need a hard reset? I ask because Pocket IE seems to randomly trash the rendering of images with sometimes turquoize backgrounds, wrong colours etc. and it seems to be on GIFs and JPEGs. Sometimes the pictures appear as enlarged pictures made of 'lines', like an interlaced picture without the second field as it were.

Thanks in advance for any help, I do appreciate it

I have been using H/PCs for, too long! (And once owned a Jornada 720 which I now miss a lot, but c'est la vie!)

Thanks,

Vicky

The SP1 is known to effectively break PIE on the z50, you need to remove the updated imgdecmp.dll from \windows to fix that - alas it doesn't always fix it. The bit that you don't want to install is CE_OS.<cpu> the OS update part.

Here you go: http://www.hpcfactor.com/support/cesd/h/0042.asp

Wonderful thank you for this

2D Acceleration was already on but these tips are good. I also noticed a setting that looked like the bit depth which I altered to 8 although I'm not sure if it is now running on 8bit (256 colours) and if it's made any real difference.

I'll also fix that Pocket IE thing too.

Thanks again Shame my z50 is missing its IrDA cover!

Vicky

The driver doesn't respond to the bit depth setting on the internal display, that's why it isn't covered in the tweaks. Of course there will be a performance benefit from reducing the colour depth, however it will be marginal as the CPU/display balance is reasonable on these devices - especially with 2d acceleration running.

That probably explains that one then. Being the eternal tinkerer I had to try

Again the tips have been useful but the z50 is performing marvellously as a PDA, more than I expected it to.

I'm certain the Glyph Cache has made a difference if anything but mostly the 'slow' response is more the dual scan display rather than the z50 itself. (Which I am pretty much exclusively using for its pre-installed apps)

Thanks again,

Vicky

System performance and screen technology are not related. The DSTN will simply fail to draw from the frame buffer if it cannot keep up with the CPU (ghosting).

I think that's what I said? :S Or not, no matter. Either way I've gotten quite used to TFT in the past few years on the PowerBook 1400c (It was a DSTN machine way back when....), T40 and Dell 2001FP panels so I really noticed on the z50 as the smaller H/PCs have a smaller screen to refresh etc.

With regard to performance though:

Out of interest though the mouse pointer on the z50, would that have been one of IBM's modifcations to H/PC Pro to support its trackpad? I ask since the pointer is different from the usual Windows one, and the hourglass looks very close to the old Win 3.x hourglass

Not having used, seen or owned (obviously, unless I was blindfolded..!) a Jornada 820 or MobilePro 800/880, Aero 8000 etc. -- how are they with regard to screen refresh and snappiness compared to the z50? The MobilePro would be a fairer comparison both being MIPS.

I'm just wondering if the suspicion the z50's CE implementation wasn't optimised, the mouse support is one of those things, particularly with regard to its passive matrix display.

The reason I am mentioning this is because my Velo 1 (and 500 when it worked) are a lot snappier (perhaps its 4bit STN display helps) and J690 is also a lot 'slicker'. Appreciably they have smaller screens to update--does this account for all of the z50s apparent lag at times? It's not that bad by any means but it feels a bit more 'resistant' compared to other H/PCs I have used. I'm guessing the 820 is a bit like the J720 being StrongARM based in terms of peppiness.

It can't be RAM as I was fortunate to get one with the full 48MB.

I love using the machine but I can't help but feel there is a lot of horsepower available that is being sapped somehow or just not being used. I'd just be interested in how the other Jupiter class H/PC Pros of the z50s size are compared to the z50 on anecdotal evidence.

Of course I can't part with the z50 for the world. It always looks great with my ThinkPad T40, and causes some alarm when they sit side by side! Someone even thought Lenovo had released a super small class Z series machine, confusing it with theit z60/61 series... I soon put them right I'd even say that they keyboard is better than my T40s, more like a TP 600E/600X class machine (as those would be of the same era)

Vicky

i think it is due to many reasons. the z50 probably doesnt have a (good) dedicated graphics chip so the mips has to do all the work. then, ce 2.11 is seriously unoptimized (try upgrading a nec 780 to 790, you'll be amazed), and maybe ibm didnt do their best either. you should check out the smartbook, higher res and very fast.
sorry, the jornada 820 isn't fast either. i never saw a z50, but i did try a 820..

Very interesting stuff.

I do notice that my J690 on 2.11 seems to run a lot better, that has H/PC pro 3.01 in ROM mind, whereas I (after a hard reset) am running H/PC Pro 3.0 on the z50.

I always remember the J720 I had (well both of them) some years back always ran like a champ, the J690 (as I don't really 'do' multimedia on H/PCs) seems very much as snappy as that was.

Was CE 2.12 better optimised?

I think the z50 has a dedicated graphic ship, ITE IT8181 or something, but it's not the screen as running it on my Dell monitor via the VGA out 'replicates' the slow refreshes so it would seem like its a combination of factors at work here.

that said, it's not that bad and I still love it

The trackPoint on the z50 is a custom driver over and above the core CE pointer default. The pointer is the standard GWES sample one, the egg timer the same.

The smaller mips devices would not be a fair test, they only need to draw 50% of the screen area than that of the z50.

IBM undertook a lot of inhouse driver development on the z50, replacing a large swathe of the CE core drivers with their own versions - the PCMCIA drivers are one such example, which is why the z50 can be somewhat prone to PC Card issues, and why the SP1 (3.01 is integgrated SP1) for H/PC Pro starts breaking things. The custom driver's ultimately don't help with performance - IBM didn't have the skills that NEC or hp have developed over time, and the z50 was their first and last H/PC.
The devices frame buffer is not well equipped memory wise, which hits display draw times.

When 2.11 first arrived on the scene I maintained that Microsoft had not excelled themselves with it, the core was combersom, had bad thread management and was a step backwards from 2.00 in terms of performance. Most people took the trade-off; a hit in performance for more advanced functionality. The problem was however, the 2.11 core, not H/PC Pro itself. If you think 2.11 is bad, try 2.10.

Very interesting to read this.

Shot my z50 several times when I tried to update system software
When I first got my hands on it I was amazed. A really little notebook!
I´ve got to change my mind when I realized how slow it was compared with my other toys. Tweaking registry didn´t help so much...

Compared with my other HPC Pros I´d give the following Rating (best first):
Compaq Aero 8000
Samsung Izzy Pro
HP Jornada 820
IBM z50

Even screen refresh is a little worse on my workpad...

Andreas

Edited by AndiF 2007-03-17 11:22 AM

This would make a good question for the NetBSD guys & gals. If they experience better performance from their efforts in the Unix world, then it follows that 2.11 is killing the device.