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What is "Bryan's
Tech Corner"? This page features articles by Bryan, proud owner of a T100X and other eclectic oddball computers, digital and electronic gadgets. Here are some of his T100X tips and experiments. In addition, this section features contributions by YOU the visitors. You can contact Bryan at his email address: biggers@globaldialog.com |
What's inside?
Click here to see a large picture (75KB) of an opened T100X.
1) the processor is AMD, the 25MHz part. It is surface mount. There was no obvious clock crystal or jumpers for a clock generator, so probably can't overclock it. There isn't enough room for one of those press-on 486 upgrades which need about 1" clearance I think.
2) Boy, this was tempting, it looks like there might be enough room to perm. mount a type III drive in one of the slots. You would have to rip out the eject mechanism for the type II cards... That would let you get in a decent sized fast drive. I got a 130MB one for about $70 I think.
3) You could probably squish in a regular 2.5 inch drive if you took out one or more of the backup batts. I think that one is just used to hold up the RAM during resume mode, so maybe you could live without that. You would have to make an extention cable for the 2.5" cable I think. I don't think that the BIOS will recognize bigger drives though; maybe you could use ontrack to partition it. Sounds like quite a project though...
What's behind that small back door
of the T100X?
I just opened that little door on the back of the 100X; Just couldn't
stand not knowing. There is a screw under the rubber plug. Under there
there are two stick batteries, one lithium non-rechargable (maybe for the
CMOS backup) and one NiCad rechargable (to hold up power so you have a
couple minutes to change batteries during suspend). They look to be replacable
in the future, but you might have to solder the connector onto some new
batts.
I hear music! Sound for your T100X
Bob Canuel writes: "I noticed there wasn't any info on sounds cards or drivers. There was a sound driver I saw once loaded on a PC that used the PC internal speaker to play sound files (WAV, not sure about MIDI and others). I believe we can use this as a poor man's substitute to a sound card but I have to find and test it."
How do I upgrade the disk drive?
I used an Integral Periphrals 80MB 1.8" Laptop IDE (The disk drive was purchased from a private party which no longer has anymore). Supposedly this drive has a standard 2.5" connector, and I have a 2.5" to 3.5" adaptor, so I should be able to format the drive in another machine, and get all the software installed (and put on DOS 6.22). The adapter is only necessary if you want to format the 80mb on another PC. If it works, I could set up a drive like this for you; you could back up all your stuff with interlnk, pop in the new drive, and restore everthing except DOS.
You will need a 2.5" to 3.5" adapter; I've seen them for about $5, and access to a regular desktop computer to format the drive. Think of it as insurance anyway, if you mess up your drive in the T100x, you could reformat it in the desktop and recover without having to have a floppy. Also, try to have the drive formatted with DOS. Then you could just pop it in, and use interlnk to move your stuff over.
[a few weeks later ;-) ]
Got my 80 meg drive (76.35mm by 51.0 mm by 15.2 mm)today and put it in. Seems to work fine. Kind of tricky putting it in, the main problem being that I didnt' have the right kind of 2.5" to 3.5" connector and had to bend and file the one that I did have. Installed the drive in another machine, formatted it and got DOS on it (I put on 6.22 just for fun), then used INTERLNK to move all the software over from the T100X. Then popped the drive into the T100X; its not too bad.
Typical 2.5" to 3.5" adapter looks like this (side view)
The problem is, that the board has to attach to the drive by (in my drawing) flipping 90 degrees counterclockwise, then plugging in to the drive. There is what we used to call in organic chem "steric hinderance" where the top of the drive gets in the way. I had to file the 2.5" connector and bend the pins on the drive (careful1) our by 45 degrees to get them to mate, and even then it was dicey. If you can find a cable type flexible adapter, buy that!
The longest dim. is a circuit board, so that could vary. The connector points up, and within the 76mm. It is a standard 2.5" drive setup.
Porting the software to the 80MB drive
Will I see a noticable improvement with the new disk drive?
I did test the drive speed before and after and found it to be identical (poor!).
Did upgrading to 80MB drive change the disk access speeds?
Same...rotten. I used CORETEST to measure it before and after, it was the same. The drive looks identical. (by the way, the drive inthe laptop is inside some copper shielding material for RF, I wasn't able to save it so I throw it away, also, there is a plate on the bottom of the original drive, save that for the new one.)
170mb drives?! Probably not..
Michael Riley wants to know the height of the drive (Is it 13mm?). He may have a source for high capacity drives.
Bryan said it is... 76.35mm by 51.0 mm by 15.2 mm. The size does vary depending on exactly where you measure. The longest dim. is a circuit board, so that could vary. The connector points up, and within the 76mm. It is a standard 2.5" drive setup.
Can a bigger drive fit inside?
Also, there is not enough room to fit in a regular 2.5 inch hard drive in the hard drive area. However, you COULD remove one of the backup batteries (the one for the resume mode, I think) and fit it in that way. Your machine would not last through a battery change without AC adapter if you did this. I think that one of the batteries is just used to maintain the RAM for the resume mode and "hard RAM" feature. Probably most people could dispense with it. You would need to build an extention cable to do this, and the BIOS probably will not allow larger drives.
Batteries die out quickly.
As for your battery question in your last msg, yes, they die out quick. Making it worse is that they seem to take forever to recharge if the computer is on, and also that they are NiMH batteries and loose their charge rapidly just sitting there (I've heard as much as 50-100% in just a couple weeks). That means that your spare is probably just about dead anyway.
Toshiba claims 1.5 to 2 hrs of battery life on the T100X pentop computer. While this might be true for a machine just sitting there, with the backlight off and the hard drive spun down, the actual life is much less. Mark Buenafe reports only 20-30 minutes of battery life, I typically get about an hour. (no doubt this reflects different usages of the machine). I think that Toshiba felt faintly guilty about this; that's why they provide 2 batteries with the units.
Check out the photo section for more pictures of the batteries.
What affects the battery life?
Several things affect the battery life, you might be able to get better performance by messing with them. Typical to internet postings, I have not made any actual current measurements, but I plan to do so in the future.
How can I maximize battery life?
Engraved Battery dates?
My battery has the following engraved: "94-16". Does
anybody know what this means? I suspect it is the year it was made. Another
contributor told me he has two which are marked 94-11 and 94-16, and one
from 93-11.
More about the batteries
Mike G
enlightened me about the batteries in the T100X. There exists a battery
beyond the CMOS battery which keeps the memory active. That's why you can
set up a RAM drive and not loose the data when you turn it off. Also, a
saved session is kept in memory and not in the HD like most systems.
The external battery charges the internal one so it is constantly in use.
This explains why my battery drains fast even thought the machine
is turned off. Mike had these observations about his batteries:
Battery Mystery Exposed! Click here for photos.
I have never seen the replacement batteries, unfortunately. On other laptops, I've re-built the packs by obtaining the individual cells. I should crack one of these open and see what they look like. Hope that they are AA size NiMH, because you can just buy those with solder tabs already on them. Just looking at the pack, it is long enough for 2 rows of 6 cells, but that would be about 8V, not 7.2 as on the pack. I'm not sure of voltage on NiMH cells though. The pack is welded, so you would have to crack it open, I put them in a vice to get the crack to start on the seam. Looking that the pack again, I'll bet that it uses "N" or "SUB-C" cells though. Be nice to X-Ray one!
No, need to X-ray, Mr Jable opens the battery case!
Jable writes: ...I did not destroy case. Slide a small knife into one side and slowly worked my way around the case popping it loose. Use a very thin pocket knife. I started on long flat side, just under the battery hold downs. Slip knife along very carefully, not easy to do without cracking case. The battery I had was bad - nothing to loose. I think I was very lucky.
The batters are nickel -metal hydride (1.2V) and each have HR marked on one end. This stands for High Capacity - Rapid Charge ( I think).
You could replace them with the same type which is what I will probably do but with lithium ion might be a little trouble and more expensive. Lithiums usually have twice the voltage for the same size battery (3V) and I am not sure how the T100X would work with 9 volts and possibly a different charging impedence. I will probably just replace the defective cell (I'm frugal).
The layout is as follows:
[] [] []
[] [] []
Should I use a 28.8 modem or a 14.4 modem?
I tried a 14.4 modem in the T100X instead of my usual 28.8 modem with microsoft explorer. I could not really see any speed difference; most of the time is spent drawing the screen and beating the hard drive. So don't rush out to buy a 28.8. Maybe with more RAM there would be an improvement, I'll let you know. p.p.p.s. Set my swap file to be permanent instead of temp,and that does help the speed a bit. This might not be an option with the 40 MB drive though' too much space used by the swap file. I also tried setting the swap file to a Flash RAM card; that was really slow. I guess that flash ram is slow to write, fast to read.
Note: Bryan provided me number which I lost. (Sorry). In any case, the improvement wasn't dramatic. I believe it was around 20-30% better. The display refresh is the bottleneck.
Is it possible to make an adapter to a non-T100X Toshiba external floppy drive?
The toshiba site, they have pinouts for the floppy port for just about all of the machines except the 100x. All seem to be just a 1:1 correlation, so maybe it would be possible to wire in a floppy. Are most external floppies for PCs the same except for their connectors? I mentioned earlier that I have a external Toshiba floppy for Toshiba laptop 710 model. At work, we swap floppies for 710,720, and 410 with no problem. The connectors, as you know, don't fit into the T100X.
It also might be possible to wire in your own floppy if you had the pinout. A friend of mine did that for another old toshiba laptop, it was just a matter of hooking the right wire to the right spot in his case; there was nothing special about the drive electronics. Looks like a plastic pin prevents you from inserting the parallel cable in the floppy port, but that could be broken off and you could then wire the drive to a DB-25 which might be easier than finding the connector.
The ones that I've looked at are just a 1:1 hookup for the pins, so that with a little solder and wire you could hook up a standard floppy if you had the connectors. You would have to provide 5V power to the drive too. Some of them, like my old Compaq, are propriotary though.
I would solder a DB-25 right to the victim floppy drive; drives are only $22 new these days, and I think I have some old ones laying around. The problem is finding the pinout. The only reason that I want the floppy is so that I can boot up after I mess up the hard drive.
Where can I get more information about the T100X?
I use INTERLNK on the T100X and run intersvr on the desktop. In your config.sys file put in
DEVICE=C:\interlnk.exe /auto
the /auto switch makes the driver not install if there is no connection so it does not waste any memory if you aren't using it. You have to have intersvr running and be all hooked up when you boot.
A RAM card works great, and REALLY perks up the web browser. I still
don't see much difference between 14.4 and 28.8; I think that the slowness
is in forming and drawing the characters on the screen. With the extra
RAM it's almost as fast as my desktop.
That made a really big difference. I'm using Internet Explorer because
it was free. A lite browser would probably work better. With the bigger
drive, I set permanent swap file in Windows and saw a little performance
increase, but the drive still beat away like crazy.
Can anyone tell me if 16 meg memory cards were ever produced by Toshiba (or others) for the T100x?
I believe that to be true. The part numbers are as follow:
The T200 and the T100 use different memory cards.
Can T200X memory cards work on the T100X?
The answer might be provided by somebody who wrote to me. Before purchasing,
you might want to drop Rex a note to find out the details. If you are unable
to contact him, try investigating this compatibility issue before purchasing.
"I found my memory card at www.auction-sales.com. They still have 4MB modules for $19 at http://www.auction-sales.com/9046.htm. These are used and are for the T200X. I found the only side effect of the T200X cards (besides only seeing 6MB of 8MB) was that the suspend mode on the T100X fails. A PITA, but worth it for the price. As ever, YMMY." - Rex Perkins
Update 4/20/97 - the email address above bounces. You can try again since he may have had this email forwarded to a bad email address.
I installed the Toshiba Card Manager but I can't get the modem to work!
I had the same problem using my modem/fax card with the pen. I solved
the problem in two ways. First I change the address of com3: to 2EO in
the control panel. I also changed my network card was operating on IRQ
9 (I have a feeling that the pen uses IRQ 5). When I did this, the modem,
the network card and the pen worked together... No com3: problem. But when
I went back to check the com3: port, it was set back to 2F8 and everything
still worked.
See the Getting Started section for more
modem information.
Mike G writes: I have this card and after the card is inserted I only need to open the small door to use the plug.
Maybe this IBM Home and Away Card is a non-issue. -Mark
I'd like to use a Backpack CDROM, the type that attaches to the parallel printer port.
I have used a parallel port IDE adapter, I don't see why a CDROM should be any different.
What crazy things are you doing with your T100X?
I'm also thinking about mounting this in my car to use with my GPS;
the main limitation again being the problem of getting the software to
run and storing enough map on the system. I note that there is what looks
like a mounting screw hole on the back of the unit. Also, the screen is
much easier to read in sunlight than my "real" laptop because
its "transflective" (I guess it has a partially reflective coating
under it that reflects some light so you can see it in bright light.) I
can't read the screen on my big laptop at all in sun.
Do you plan to DoubleSpace a portion of
that drive?
No, its slow enough already!
Hardware bug with power switch?
"...It will not always turn on, some times it hangs up in the RAM test, some times it says the hard drive isn't there. I suspect one of the new components (drive) that I added... Also, sometimes I can't turn it off! It just ignores the power switch. This could be a problem with the battery too, some toshibas get crazy and will not run without the battery being in good condition (they use the battery to filter the power supply). The weird thing is that once it's on, it works fine..."
...a few days later ...
"I took out the RAM card, booted it a few times, worked OK. (I) put the card back in, booted it a few times, worked OK! Now I don't know what to think, ha."
I've had this problem, but it only happened once. I simply used the reset button. However, I think my problem was a different case. -Mark
More info; I took out my 80MB drive and put the 40MB back in because of my "lockup problem". Now it works fine, so... I can rule out the memory card or anything wrong with the machine, its either the drive hardware, or the software that I have on it. I suspect the drive. Especially since I
More info; My machine locks up when you try to load the emm386 from DOS 6.22. Applying the fix pack on the Toshiba site fixes this. My lockups could be due to the 6.22 software, I'll try putting the Toshiba DOS on it some time; its a project though because I have to take the 40MB out and put it in another machine to get the DOS off it. (maybe there is a way to use FDISK /MBR to do this...)
