CF-25 toughbook CPU question

[pentium]

I picked up two of these laptops today and I have heard that the internal processor can be upgraded. I looked around and found out that while there was no way to softmod it to use something faster than a 166 MMX there is a way to hardwire it.
From what I hear I have to go and solder pins Y33 and X34 to pin Y37 (with some sort of current-limiting resistor between Y33/X34 and Y37) and then remove pins Y33 and X34 and it should at least hardwire the multiplier so you can run stable at 233 Mhz with MMX.

Now, before I start chopping up a spare 233, I need to know what best defines a current-limiting resistor. I have a few random resistors but what specifically so I need?

[pentium]

Re: CF-25 toughbook CPU question

I soldered in place an SMT 1K ohm resistor and that seems to have worked fine.

[370forlife]

Re: CF-25 toughbook CPU question

Considering how think toughbooks are now, that thing must be a brick. Speaking of which, I got a old IBM thinkpad that is a brick, but I put in a 8gb hard drive, and a 128mb stick of pc100 ram with a 233mhz pentium pro mmx, and put XP on it. It actually runs pretty good.

[Scenic]

Re: CF-25 toughbook CPU question

@370forlife: sounds like a Thinkpad 770 (old high end series... they even had an option for a special MPEG2 decoder card to watch DVDs on the 13,7" 1280x1024 display (on a Pentium/PentiumII!!!))

http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Category:770
http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Category:770X

i've got the 770X..

[pentium]

Re: CF-25 toughbook CPU question

It's not super thick actually but it is still thick enough to hold three PCMCIA slots stacked one on top of the other.
If I could find a decent WIfi card (or ANY card) that does not stick out the side of the thing (at least half a centimeter shorter than a regular PCMCIA card) I might also try wiring the old cellular antenna built into the side of the screen to the Wifi card and have integrated Wifi and still have two free PCMCIA slots.




The real bummer is that I can't use anything newer than Windows 98SE (apparently it can use ME but that would be stoopid ). The damn bios is so old and so horrible that Windows 2000 and above absolutely hates this laptop with a passion.


Also, yes you can see my booze stash in those photos.

[gdement]

Re: CF-25 toughbook CPU question

I'd install NT4. Sure it doesn't have laptop-oriented power management features, but who cares.


edit: it lacks USB support though, in case that's an issue.

NT4 is very fast on an old machine like that. It makes 98 look like Vista.

[pentium]

Re: CF-25 toughbook CPU question

NT you say?
Well I have a copy of NT Workstation (wish it was NT pro) so I'll use that then as ther are NT drivers for this laptop.
As for no USB, thing should be hopefully be fixed with a PCMCIA card and the GPS module I have is serial anyways.

Wait, I always had networking issues with NT. I could never figure out why it would never connect to the internet or a network. It would be nice to update whatever I could.

[pentium]

Re: CF-25 toughbook CPU question

Well this is odd
I popped in a 10Gb drive and even after partitioning to to 8Gb, the NT installer refused to format it as an NTFS disk because it was apparently too big.

What?

[Wizard]

Re: CF-25 toughbook CPU question

That is why I avoid these. I'd rather save and pay up bit more much money on a notebook that supports 2000 and XP.

And keep playing in the 98 & NT sandbox with this old notebook that they are *designed* for.

[kc8adu]

Re: CF-25 toughbook CPU question

sounds like a job for some form of linux.

[pentium]

Re: CF-25 toughbook CPU question

Well this is interesting.
During the partitioning and formatting stage in the NT installer it could only see 8Gb of disk space but I just tried partitioning and formatting using the Windows 2000 installer and not only did it format fine but it also saw all 10Gb of space.
>:/
It's nice to see that (at least the installer) Windows 2000 will use the whole drive however like mentioned above, this toughbook is a little underpowered for Win2k.
I'll try installing NT and see what happens.

[pentium]

Re: CF-25 toughbook CPU question

damnit! Still no dice.

[pentium]

Re: CF-25 toughbook CPU question

Okay, it looks like that if the drive is less than 8Gb in size, you will have no problems but if it is larger than 8Gb you get all sorts of funky errors. Even Suse and Ubuntu don't want to install on a driver larger than 8Gb.

[zandrax]

Re: CF-25 toughbook CPU question

Okay, it looks like that if the drive is less than 8Gb in size, you will have no problems but if it is larger than 8Gb you get all sorts of funky errors. Even Suse and Ubuntu don't want to install on a driver larger than 8Gb.

Crippled bios implementation: most bios earlier than 1997 can't detect disks bigger than 8 GB (the so-called INT13 limit) and the CF-25 has a Phoenix bios with this and a lot of problems.
First look for a firmware update on the Panasonic Thoughbook' site: the notebook is from 1996 and in that time Flash chips started to diffuse as bios eeproms, so you may preprogram it. The chance is small, I know, but worth trying because the alternative is a LBA traslating driver, such as the old Ontrack Disk Manager, Micro House EZDrive and licensed versions for manifacturers (e.g. Maxtor MaxBlast): these drivers install themselves on the MBR, catch all disks calls to bios and redirect them to the drive. Main drawback is, of course, the need of the same driver (same version too) when recovering or booting from floppies/cds: you won't access to the partition if you don't load it and you may even corrupt it under extreme circumstances; try the latest driver available because, being them mainly DOS oriented drivers, some old versions don't like file systems different from FAT or behave strangely: this may prevent to install NT or Linux.

Another suggestion: expand the ram, 64 MB are sufficient for Windows 98SE, NT 4.0 or a lightweight linux distro such as Damn Small Linux (not much headroom for programs), 128+ MB would be a lot better but I don't know if it can handle or take advantage of them (e.g. the dreadful 430VX chipset can cache up to 64 MB, so anything above that limit slows down a lot the computer). If you really want to work on it then try some fully configurable distros: Arch Linux, Gentoo, Slackware, Debian netinstall allows you to install the bare minimum and only the programs you need. Discard the Ubuntu galaxy, even Xubuntu is way too much bloated and would swap continuously on your portable: I have a Thinkpad 600 with a Pentium II 233 and 160 MB of ram so I speak from experience.

@ Scenic and 370forlife: it could be a 560 with the Port replicator (it doubles the thickness), but the description fits more the 770

Zandrax

[pentium]

Re: CF-25 toughbook CPU question

Well I combed over the panasonic website and I saw no visual sign of a newer BIOS (I'll look again anyways) and as for rem, this thing has 96mb of ram installed (which I think is the max) as well.

EDIT: There are several tools disks I'll try out as I have a bunch of floppies.

[zandrax]

Re: CF-25 toughbook CPU question

Well I combed over the panasonic website and I saw no visual sign of a newer BIOS (I'll look again anyways) and as for rem, this thing has 96mb of ram installed (which I think is the max) as well.

Ok.

EDIT: There are several tools disks I'll try out as I have a bunch of floppies.

If you need them, I have two or three versions of EZDrive on old backup discs: I needed them for a 1.2 GB drive installed in my old 486. One was shipped with the Win 3.1's 32 bit Fastdisk driver too

Zandrax

[pentium]

Re: CF-25 toughbook CPU question

Well most of the tool discs are for post-windows install issues and the latest BIOS update is almost ten years and a month old (Nov 11, 98). So looks like updating that is a dead end.

:/
Well it turns out that something was going screwy with the format command.
While NTFS formatting still won't work on the 10Gb drive, it seems that every time I tried to do a FAT32 format it was making a FAT16 format in the order of 8Gb. I made a new boot floppy and reformatted the drive to 8Gb and after double checking that it had properly formatted I started installing Windows 98 and so far it seems to be installing problem-free.

[Wizard]

Re: CF-25 toughbook CPU question

good for you to learn this trick.

Cheers, Wizard

[gdement]

Re: CF-25 toughbook CPU question

I vaguely remember reading about some issues with partition sizing in NT4. I think installing on anything bigger than 4GB might have been a problem. It gets fixed when you install SP6a I think.
It never affected me because the laptop I installed it on only had something like a 1-2GB drive. With larger drives my habit was still to install on a 2GB system partition.

That laptop had BIOS problems too. Sometime later I plugged in a 12GB drive, but I had to use a utility to reprogram the capacity to more like 6GB. Anything bigger and the BIOS would freeze. Then used software to get the full capacity back. What a mess.

[pentium]

Re: CF-25 toughbook CPU question

God, this toughbook hates me.
Restarting or shutting down hangs on the splash screen, my only wireless network card is detected but at the same time, "invisible" to windows and all the drivers came on floppies and if you installed off a cd you are screwed as you can't hot swap the cd drive and floppy drive and it looks like ther is some crude USB support on the thing but it is disabled in the BIOS (not to mention no USB ports exist on this laptop). It's Windows 98SE or bust. I would really like to get Streets and Trips working with this and it won't work on 95 which will be my last ditch effort for an OS on this laptop.