GPD Pocket

I've had a clearout - the Omnibooks have gone (except the 300), the Lifebook U810 has gone, the Zaurus SL-C1000 has gone. In their place I have a GPD Pocket which I helped crowdfund on Indiegogo...not that they needed it, they exceeded their target by something like 1500%.

I ordered the Windows version since I wanted something that pretty much worked out of the box since I expected the Ubuntu port would be a bit rough. This turned out to be case since GPD hadn't really done Linux before and Intel's docs for the Cherry Trail platform are woeful. However, the community has now stepped up and there are several flavours which now perform quite acceptably.  I'll probably get round to trying some in due course.

It's a lovely little device which you can read about elsewhere online (seriously, just Google it) but I can say I haven't really had any of the problems that others have reported. It's one of the first run of the devices and I haven't even done the "standard" mods like flashing the unlocked BIOS or replacing the thermal compound on the heatsink. Keyboard is not a problem - it's huge compared to the U810 or the Zaurus - and I never liked trackpads anyway so the trackpoint is just fine.

However, on to the the main topic of this posting. Since the Pocket is running Windows 10, that is definitely going to need some work before I consider it usable. It's interesting how much better the Linux "out-of-the-box experience" generally is (when all the drivers work)...which is a bit of a turnaround. Then again, the following process is all about making Windows as Linux-like as possible! 

1. Wait an age while Windows updates and reboots, updates and reboots while attempting to index the contents of the SSD. So turn off the indexing service to speed things up...and probably never turn it on again since it never seems to be any use to me.
2. Install NTLite and prune out the cruft - like all the apps, the App Store, Cortana etc. that take up space and, on occasion, CPU and thus battery power. After that, the Windows 10 tile menus start to look a bit empty...   
3. Install Classic Shell to get some nice sensible menus. I favour Classic style menus.
4. Install Spybot Anti-Beacon to shut off most of Microsoft's snooping. Default settings seem to work best - delve too deeply into the optional settings and you can break updates which is probably worse from a security point of view than the meagre trickle of data that remains.
5. Install WinXCorners to make the half-baked multiple desktop implementation in Windows actually usable. I set it so the mouse in the top right corner shows all desktops for task switching - which is how I have it in Linux.
6. Install ThrottleStop to better manage the CPU power draw - I have the following config:
1. CPU Voltage ID reduced to 0.6650. I'm not sure that the number displayed is right but it does drop power consumption noticeably. Any lower and I get occasional blue screens.
2. Turbo Power Limits (TPL Button) configured with:
1. Package power long: 3W (this is the long term average power limit)
2. Package power short: 5W (this allows short bursts above the average up to the turbo time limit)
3. Turbo time limit: 10s
3. Low power profile that disables turbo (limits the CPU to 1.6Ghz)
4. Default power profile that allows full turbo to 2.56GHz
5. I did some tests with Geekbench 3 to test the various power levels. At 5W, all the cores will turbo up to 2.56 GHz, at 4W only two cores can spin up, and at 3W only one core will boost and even then only to around 2.4GHz. At the 2W notional "scenario design power" it appears that only one core can even reach 1.6Ghz, which is basically unusable, so Intel have been rather creative with the figures. 
6. Also, note that this does not factor in GPU power consumption since I don't really game much on the GPD. If you do then you'll need to add a watt or two to the package limits.
7. With these settings I will get typically 8-10 hours of use during the day - web browsing, document editing, emailing and Skyping - which suits me fine.
7. Install the rest of the Open Source stack that I use
1.  NextCloud I always sync everything (phone/laptop etc.) to my own servers. Nothing that I can't afford to lose goes into anyone's cloud!
2.  LibreOffice of course
3. I do a fair bit of image management from my camera (that's another post!) so RawTherapee and Digikam although I am now looking at DarkTable since they have a Windows version now.
4. Firefox and Thunderbird - Firefox Quantum is really looking rather good!
5. Password Gorilla
8. And a couple of proprietary but free goodies
1. Microsoft Research's Image Composite Editor which is a really very good panorama stitcher that runs a treat on the Pocket. Whatever you think of MS as a whole, the guys at MS Research do some really good stuff.
2. Foxit Reader the least annoying PDF viewer that I have encountered

...and there you have it.

Re-installing Windows 95 on the Omnibook 800CT

Having sold off some of my clutch of Omnibooks, I decided to rebuild the 800CT that remains as a Windows machine for running old software. There are still a lot of OB fans out there so they all (two 800CT/133's and a 600C) found good homes.

For starters, I pop an 8GB Lexar Platinum CF card into a CF-to-PATA adapter to do duty as a hard drive. Even a relatively slow CF card is faster than the 2.5-inch hard drives of the time and considerably lower in power consumption. All my Omnibooks run off CF cards, even the 300 now it has a BIOS 1.01 upgrade card.

I plug in the floppy drive and CDROM drive and boot up the machine. The Omnibook gets part way through loading MSDOS and then hangs so hard that I need to prod the hard reset nubbin on the side to get a hard reboot. The restore floppy disk is an original and getting on for 20 years old so lets try creating a new one since it's probably corrupt. Same problem. Fair enough, the floppy drive is getting on for the same age so lets try another another one of those. Still crashes. It could be the cable - but I don't have a spare.

Let's try another boot disk - I have Slackware floppies from previous experiments. These appear to work fine. Curiouser and curiouser. Time to sleep on it.

Next day, I extract the CF card and make it DOS bootable in another machine. I intend to copy the contents of the Omnibook CD onto it along with the image restore software from the Omnibook boot floppy. The Omnibook floppy checks that it is running on an Omnibook and then restores from an encrypted Windows image so it has to be run on the actual machine. Clever, but a real pain right now.

Absentmindedly, I fire up the Omnibook without the CF card in and it boots just fine from the FDD. The penny drops - all my other machines had Transcend CF cards in but this one has a Lexar. I put a Transcend CF card in and everything works just fine - the Lexar's TrueIDE mode is obviously not DOS compatible (but fine with the Slackware as I found out earlier).

So, now I have a windows 95 OSR 2 newly built, what do I put on it?

First of all some further system bits:

1. erpdude8's Unofficial Windows 95 Service pack 1.05
2. WinZip 8.0 (OldApps is your friend - I can't find it on their website). Not strictly a system component but it makes installing later stuff simpler. You'll need an old licence key as well, I don't know if a new one will work.      
3. CPUIdle 5.8c to improve power usage - I should get an update but I've long since lost the download key and the new features are for things way newer than the 800CT.
4. The ACITS LPR Client - Let's you print to network attached printer like Windows XP. The link is for Columbia U since the Texas U links are broken. It's free for non-commercial use.
5. Lexmark Universal Printer Driver 1.X - I have a Lexmark Colour Laser, they provide Linux and Win 9X drivers which puts they way ahead of other providers in my books. The 9X driver is a bit generic so you have to manually configure things like duplex and colour.
6. Drivers for my Xircom CEM56-100 - Well done Intel for keeping them online.

Then onto some applications:

1. Netscape 6.23 - You can haul it off somewhere like OldApps but, thanks to AOL parentage it tries to install a load of guff as well, so go for a custom install and skip the AOL, RealPlayer and Mail. WinAmp is OK though. Also remember to remove the registration nag by deleting/renaming C:\Program Files\Netscape\Netscape 6\components\activation.dll 
2. MS Office 97 - But remember to expunge the Fast Find feature since it will clobber your battery life (remove it from the Startup folder). I imagine it will nag me to register with some now-defunct mechanism in due course.
3. Acroread 4.05 - OldApps again
4. ACDSee 2.3 - All the later versions gained a lot of extra functionality and cruft (and expense) which I really don't need - just a simple image viewer is all I want.