28 Jun
2004
28 Jun
'04
10:18 a.m.
At 09:45 PM 6/27/04 +0100, you wrote:
Actually, I have an idea that the 110 and Portable+ will run from the
adapter with no battery installed. I am not sure if they're supposed to
do this though.
It's 8V AC (so there's no pinout
information as such) from a 3VA
transformer of some 11 ohms internal resistance (and yes, that is
important according to the technical reference manual which I happen to
have).
So like some HP calcs the adapter only charges the battery, it won't run
the machine with a dead/missing battery.
As I expected the battery pack is totally dead. I doubt I'll bother
replacing the battery. I've never seen these cells at any of the usual
electronics suppliers around here. I don't doubt that one of the
specialist battery companies has them, but their prices are too rich for me.
Last time I bought some they were about \pounds 5.00 each for the cells.
I had it running for a while earlier today.
Everything seems to be working
as it should. Nothing out of the ordinary beyond the QWERTZ keyboard and
PAM being in German. The only application installed in MS-Word, which is
There's a configuration EPROM -- a 27C64 IIRC -- mapped in the
processor's I/O space that determines things like the keyboard layout,
machine memory size, hard reset defaults, etc. The TechRef gives the
format of said EPROM if you want to make changes, etc...
English.
You'll find 2 drawers under the machine, one each side, held in by a
couple of Torx-head screws. One is almost certainly a 'software drawer'
(holds EPORMs), there other might be a RAM drawer if you're lucky. Note
that both spaces must contain something for the machine to boot -- HP
made dummy drawers that shorted the right couple of pins on the connector
together if you didn't have the 'real' drawers.
Somewhere I have details of the format of the EPROMs for the software
drawer. It's similar to an MS-DOS filesystem. I think I even have a
program to burn your own files into EPROM to put in the drawer.
-tony