Greetings from San Diego.

I have been playing with small PCs for a little over ten years, and I'm glad they finally have a well established forum I can look for all the little tech and driver things I am always slogging through when playing with these little machines.

Joined today because I had some curiosities about a RamLine510 I just got from e-bay. I have quite a few years experience with several other small PCs and tablets though:

1995-ish, put a "Book PC" into my little Hyundai Excel so I could play DVDs and these cool new "MP3 files" in Winamp.....stripped down a tiny AMD K62-550 machine and had it and a 10" VGA (crt) running under the console. It was a beast of a setup...but sounded GREAT, and doubled as a MAME machine to play Donkey Kong during lunch breaks.

Over the years have always been fascinated with little tiny computers that ran "real" operating systems....so have had LOTS of experience with Toshiba Librettos, Palmax machines and now......lots of old little tablets. I could have a shiny new tablet machine, but what fun would THAT be?

Experience with Mitsubishi Amity XP machines (have two, but they have BOTH lost their IDE controllers now)....Fujitsu "stylistic" machines, Toshiba Librettos (not tablets, but still most of the same hardware limitations), and now the RamLine510 (which looks like so much fun, I'm gonna get a couple more from him).

I generally just have alot of experience in the common problems of installing OSs on machines that don't have floppy drives....aren't beefy enough to run anything above Win98se (Ramline appears to be decent enough to run XP), or are just generally a struggle to get running something it wasn't supposed to.

Librettos running KDE on FreeBSD (I think 5.3 stable)
Librettos running ridiculous hard drives (via DiskManager)
Amity machines with external amps, ridiculous hard drives, USB hub hacks to the case....external serial ports for robotics projects, WiFi sniffing.

Fujitsu pen machines (very early ones like the 510). Can't do a whole lot with these, but have loaded them up from scratch in ME or 98se and gotten their tablets to work as well.

Past projects:
Most of these ran 98SE or briefly WinME because of RAM constraints usually. They usually end up in 98se because Windows ME always tends to make a horrible SUCKING sound after awhile ;-P

Amity machines serving as MP3 jukeboxes, speech recognition and communication augmentation for handicapped (think Stephen Hawking...but for handicapped children), Wireless Internet (A,B,G and Verizon EVDO),Electronic picture frame projects (usually just slideshows...LONG before you could just buy an electronic frame these days)

Fujitsu Stylistic 510 as a car PC (Don't ask....it sucked :-P

Toshiba Libretto 70 running all sorts of different OSs....and drives from 32meg"solid state" CF to IDE setups...to shoehorning a 120gig IDE drive into one and running WinME on it for over a year.

Toshiba Libretto110 running XPpro on a P233 with 64megs is always fun.

I'm gonna usually be found in the hardware and driver parts of this site, for I am usually more interested in BUILDING these machines than actually using them.

Cheers!!

Thank you for taking the time to register and post your background. Welcome to the forums. I hope you have a great time.

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Sorry I haven't been on lately because of some work projects....and playing with Windows Vista on some (not tablet) machines.

I have been playing with some older machines lately in my spare time though, one being the Ramline510 I mention I was waiting for in my profile (YES, its a fun and...[ahem]..."challenging" machine)

Lately, just been playing with reviving an old Toshiba Libretto 70CT I had dropped to the pavement about a year ago. I know it isn't a tablet PC, but has MANY of the same issues when it comes to reloading one of these from scratch. Its little 6.1 inch LCD still runs, but has about a half inch of vertical white lines on the left side....I likely mortally wounded one corner of the glass when it tumbled last year.

I upgraded the CPU in the Ramline510 from a P3-500Mhz to a 750Mhz when I learned it was socketed and not surface-mounted (soldered) to the board like the old AmityXPs were. (It also had some handy DIP switches for playing with the clock and multipliers). I also found that it will support a 256meg module as long as it is a 16-chip item. So the Ramline510 is upgraded now from a P3-500 with 128megs, to a P3-750 and 256megs. Those two mods and upgrading it to the maximum 32gig drive made it plenty capable of running XPproSP2 now. I mentioned in the profile that I enjoy BUILDING and modding the machines.....and then try and think of something I wanna do with it LATER...LOL, so it is currently just a picture-frame and MP3 player that sounds terrible (Ramline has LOUSY onboard speakers, but they are stereo....and I'll likely hack some better speakers in place of the two REAL tiny ones at some point).....The CPU upgrade makes it run a bit warm, and I have no battery for this thing yet, so no other pending projects. I would like to later use it to maybe run the remote application for my Sony Aibo robots.

I am also in the process of resurrecting a Toshiba Libretto 110CT (Pentium233, 32megs). It will have 64megs, 80gig drive and be overclocked to a paltry 266Mhz when I am done inside. Its small, REALLY cute and has a 7.1" LCD screen.....so should be good for some total teardown and repaint, customization of the case for some fun project. I may try and do some experimenting with putting Ubuntu (Linux) or something unusual on it. If this doesn't net much joy, it will likely just run WindowsME or just 98se (or dual-boot Linux/98se if I get REAL brave). I may attempt to run XPpro on the thing, but thats REALLY pushing 266Mhz and 64megs. These old machines tend to have problems running PCMCIA cards in XP and such old hardware.