aussie's 8890 review - Page 3

Best way is to switch off at the wall before unplugging from the laptop.

I will come back to my review shortly...

Yeah I read that too.

The reason I changed the sequence was from experience with a very similar high current switching power supply a few years ago. I found that the inrush current at the power adaptor was destroying them faster than I could fix them.

If you want to try it, plug into the wall first then plug the ac into your power adaptor and listen. You will hear the inrush current hit the adaptor (it makes an audible spark noise).

If you plug it in the other way the inrush current and any mechanical slop in the connectors is minimised thus extending the adaptors life.

The power adaptors are actually quite robust. It is just you have to remember you are dealing with reasonably high currents so they need a bit of respect when you make or break the contacts.

Final configuration - drivers

After rewiring my desk to allow the 8890 to have pride of place (my desk employs a LRU (do a google if you don't know what this means) algorithm. I had an old PII acting as a fax server - it happened to be the one that lost) I completed the driver updates.

As I mentioned my original idea was to do a reload from the supplied disks to check I could rebuild the system from scratch. That worked. My next move was to restore the original disk that Sager had loaded XPP on and update it.

Some people prefer to load from scratch before they will use their system, I prefer to use what is supplied then patch it from there.

The drivers on Sagers web site (posted 18/9/2003) are not all new (this of course will change over time for anyone trolling this article later on).

The versions on the web site as at 18/9/2003 are:

AP-Key 4.0.100.1190 - newer than supplied CD. Installed. Now you get a useful bar across the screen showing you volume adjustments.

ATI 7.93 WHQL - now qualified. Newer than supplied CD. I uninstalled the 7.93 original drivers before installing these. Does provide a slight speed up with benchmarking.
Edit: new ATI 7.95 WHQL drivers are now up. There appears to be some issues with them on some games. Slight speed up.

Audio A3.43 - newer than supplied CD. My old Toshiba 2710 with Harmon Kardon speakers still sounds better .

Bluetooth 1.3.2.9 - newer than supplied CD (sort of). The drivers appear to still be 1.3.2.7 which is what is on the CD but the frontend program is now 1.3.2.9. Installed. Still trying to understand how to use this feature with my Nokia 6310 phone.
Edit: 1.42 are now available. Again there seems to be some issues with BT cards not being recognised. Not yet tested.

Chipset 5.00.1012 - same as on CD. No change.

LAN 5.602.619.2003 - same as on CD. No change.

Modem 3.20.05M - same as on CD. No change.

RAID/ATA 2.00.1480.42 - same as on CD and supplied floppies. No change. For those of you still not sure what these are for they control access to your harddisks via the built in Promise RAID chip. You need one of them (RAID or ATA) depending upon your disk config. Note: the Promise RAID controller chip is in use irrespective of the configuration. It just does not do any RAID operations if it is configured for ATA mode.

Touchpad 7.5.5 - I had to reinstall these after I installed the drivers for my Logitech wheel mouse. The Logitech install program overwrote everything else.

TV Studio 4.24 - newer than on CD. The CD version is 4.22 which crashes when trying to record. V4.24 fixes this but you must, must, must install the drivers seperately - see my other posts on this thread regarding this.

Hi ryanniedz,
Let me start with you booting question first in the form of a tutuorial.

In the BIOS (enter the BIOS by pressing F2 once during disk detection) select the BOOT screen by using the > arrow.

On that screen you will see a list of bootable devices.
The order in which you see them determines the search order the computer will go thru to find something to start.
The default sequence is:

1. floppy

2. hard disks searched in the following order:
2.1 removable cards (such as in the MP3 player or 6in1 card reader)
2.2 primary disk
2.3 secondary disk (if present and not part of a RAID set)
2.4 tertiary disk (if present, replaces TV tuner)

3. CD-ROM

4. Network devices

You will notice that the hard disks includes any cards present in the MP3/6in1 slot. This is why you must remove those devices to do a normal boot up. It is possible of course to boot from a SD card or a CF drive - you just have to load some bootable OS onto it.

You can disable any device in the boot list by pressing <Shift> 1. This will place an exclaimation mark (!) in front of the device. To re-enable the device press <Shift> 1 again. This is way you could not boot from the CD-ROM - you had disabled it. To correct that just go back to the BIOS, enter the boot screen, scroll down to the CD-ROM and press <Shift> 1 and the exclaimation mark will disappear.

You will notice that the CD-ROM comes after the floppy and hard disks in the boot check sequence. This would mean that the computer will look first at a floppy then the hard disks, then the CD-ROM to find something to boot. Obviously if it finds something on one of the hard disks first it will boot that.

If you want to make the CD-ROM the first disk to check for a boot image (such as the XP product recovery CD) you need to use the plus (+) and minus (-) keys. These keys will shift up (+) or down (-) the highlighted device. Thus to make the CD the first device to check scroll down to the CD-ROM device using the down arrow key (the CD-ROM device should now be highlighted in white). Press the plus (+) key and the CD-ROM will move up one in the search order. Keep pressing the plus (+) key until the CD-ROM device is at the top of the boot search list.

F10 will exit and save the new boot order.

You have two choices here and I am not quite sure about formatting at this point (needs some more research).

You can either boot XP and recover
Or you can insert a floppy to run the format program from there.
The bit I am not sure of is if the XP product recovery CD allows you to enter its format program before it scribbles on the disk. As I don't have a spare disk to check this out right now it is going to have to wait. It is a good question and one that I would like to know.

The bits I do know so far are that the XP product recovery CD-ROM will load itself into memory (not the onto a disk). During the startup phase, pressing F6 will allow 3rd party disk drivers (such as the ATA or RAID drivers we have on the supplied floppies) to be added, or pressing F2 will enter the Automatic System Recovery procedure. (Note: this requires a pre-prepared Automated System Recovery Floppy - see the notes on setting up ASR in your computers online manuals).

My previous testing was on a non bootable disk so the XP install did enter a format stage. With an existing bootable disk I am not sure (yet) (and am too scared to try it out on live data right now).

Damn, my secret is out of the bag. I am an automated tech support computer .

I have been writing tech manuals for toooo long.
Detail is important for what I do so I tend to explain in depth. You never know it might save someones bacon later down the track.

As to playing further with XP's formatting options I just did not want to destroy my live system. My second disk has a copy of the data from my old Toshiba so until it gets merged into the main disk I don't have spare disk to play with.

If you are able to test and document the formatting stages before I get a chance to be my guest. It will take me about another week to get to that stage.

As to formatting from floppy, yes you would have had to previously written a recovery floppy which would then be bootable.

Thanks for the support JeffL. It does take a lot of work putting all this down on paper but I figure that I got so much out of the forum in my early days of looking for a laptop that it is one way of paying back a bit of that help.

More info on TV tuner

I discovered something that may be of use those of you using the TV Studio software with a second monitor.

The key component is the overlay/primary mode setting.
Run the TV studio software.
Click on the TV control button (lower left corner of TV window).
Click on the "Spanner" (setup) icon in the TV controls panel.
Click on "Display Surface Mode".

If you select "Overlay":
- you can resize the TV window to any size you like
- you will NOT be able to view anything in the TV window if you move it across to the second monitor.

If you select "Primary":
- you are restricted to several TV window sizes (right click in the TV window to see the list)
- you CAN view the TV window if you move it onto a second monitor.

Note is only applies if you are running "extend my desktop onto secondary monitor" mode (see Control Panel -> Display -> Settings).

Edit: If you update your ATI video drivers (I went from 7.93 to 7.93 WHQL) you will also need to uninstall the TV Studio software (just the software - the drivers are ok) and reinstall TV Studio to reenable Full Screen mode. I found after installing the new ATI drivers Full Screen mode had stopped working.

If TV Studio is not running but you want to enable the remote control you have to have the QuickTV application running.

Sorry Ryan, I usually use people's full handles when replying formally.

As to the boot order and wearing out your CD's etc. no it would not matter if you left it in the order you specified (as long as you don't boot with a floppy or CD inserted - always wondered how my system would go with a Jimmy Hendrix CD stuck in there ). Given you are not rebooting every 5 seconds I don't know why your CD's gave out. If you are happy with the boot search order then leave it as you have it.

Almost the last of the software - MS Outlook

Nearly completed the load of all my extra software particularly ActiveState Perl and Metastock (6.52) (See comments below about moving Metastock charts).

I also decided to change from Outlook Express to Microsoft Outlook for my email client. Why? Well since I am decommissioning my SunOS box (going to run Linux via vmware to support my Unix clients) the last application that I needed was an appointment manager. It was not the easiest of conversions. In fact it took me two solid days of fiddling with MS Outlook to get it to work the way I wanted. At times Microcrap software really is that - crap.

Loaded my Office 2000 onto the laptop (I am running Win XP Pro) without any issues. I needed to perform a security/patch upgrade to the version of Office I have. These patches are getting awfully big > 20Mb.

Once Office was loaded I had to transfer my emails and contacts list across to MS Outlook from Outlook Express. To do this I ended up exporting the OL contacts seperately from the emails. I have all my emails stored in a directory that is different to the default location buried in the bowels of the file tree. I prefer to know exactly where my emails are located and be able to see and back them up easily.

MS Outlook normally stores all of its information in one .pst file which is easier to backup than OL's multiple database files. By default MS Outlook will use C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Local Settings\Applicaion Data\Microsoft\Outlook\outlook.pst
I wanted to have my files in C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\My Documents\business\dmail\<username>.pst
(I chose to name the directory dmail because it holds both my diary and my email ).

To do this you have to trick MS outlook by importing everything, closing it, then moving the default .pst file. One thing that did drive me crazy was the default way that MS Outlook creates its Contacts entries (File As field). I prefer <firstname> <lastname> for filing. It defaults to <lastname> <firstname>. I had to manually go thru and edit each entry.

Oh one issue I had - none of my appointments would display. If you get this you have a corrupted calendar folder. To fix this export all your folders except your calendar folder, exit MS Outlook, remove the original .pst file, restart MS Outlook and get it to recreate a new .pst file then reimport your email and contacts folders. That fix took me a full day to find.

ActiveState Perl and Metastock

Perl reinstalled flawlessly. I had heavily modified my copy of ActiveState Perl (build 805), so all I did was to copy the C:\perl directory over to my 8890, rerun the standard install and voila - perfectly running perl scripts. So simple.

Metastock was a challenge. I am still on version 6.52. On my old Toshiba (Win98) I use charts (.mwc files) rather than Smartcharts (.MWS) so I can modify the chart and throw away or keep the mods if I so choose (Smart Charts autosave). Because of the new file locations under XP Pro I decided to move my secuities database from c:\investments\data\Metastock to c:\Documents and Settings\<username>\investments\data\Metastock.

Because Charts (.mwc) contain references to the path where the underlying security resides you can't move them easily. The only way I found to do it was to open the charts under the old directory, tick the "save as smart chart" and save them back as smart charts (which get stored in a sub-dir MSSmart under the security's directory and do not have any path dependencies). Then I moved the whole investments tree to my new location, opened each security as a SmartChart then saved as a Chart again in my new chosen location. Messy but it meant I kept all my line studies etc.