Laptop with no moving parts

[Bob in a quantum-state-of-faith]

Well, I finally started the saga to rid my on-the-road laptop of spinning metal.

It started out with a desire to have a lower-end (used) laptop to keep in my truck.  I would store documents, user manuals, etc, there.  I would have a wireless card, for once-in-a-great-need connect to the internet when a phone call to tech support just won't do (there are fewer free hot-spots than there used to be, but the pay ones are cheap enough).

But, the spinning hard disk simply cannot hold up to the vibration of a 12 thousand pound truck's suspension.  Not to mention the temperature extremes, etc, etc, etc....

What to do?

Well....there's this little gadget that lets you substitute a solid-state compact flash card for a laptop drive.....

I discussed this with my business partner over a year ago, but at that time, the CF cards in high enough capacity were too expensive.  The best at that time was around 8gig, and these were still too high.  We wanted at least 16gig, preferably 32.

This year, the 32gig CF cards are finally low enough (sub $100us) to proceed.

Unfortunately, my business partner ordered a dual-card adapter without asking me first--he's very good, but I'm more picky about the fiddly details, when it comes to computers... he ordered several, they were $5us.

They did not work as advertised:  they were *not* engineered as a laptop drive replacement.  Even though they had the 34 pin laptop drive header, the form-factor simply would never fit in the modern laptop drive bay.  You'd have to go back to about 1995 or so, when the drives were still connected by a short ribbon cable....

So; the first adapters were a bust.

I located a 2nd brand, that looked very good:  it literally looked like they took the electronic board off a 2.5 inch laptop drive as a start.... some further research, and I was convinced these would work.  $10us, and single slot.  We ordered two.  They came in today.

Now begins the saga.

Ordinarily, I would just clone the old laptop's drive onto these, using some 3rd party utility or other, but... both the laptops I'm converting are used specials, from pawn shops.  No telling *what* they have on them.  Neither has the original OS (they are both stickered for Windows 2000, not XP as they both had running).  I planned to run win2k anyway (what I want them for, Win2k is fine) so....

To start, I confirmed the format of the flash card (FAT32) and inserted it in the adapter, the adapter into the laptop's drive tray, the tray into the laptop, and booted.  Viola!  The BIOS sees the 32gig volume.  Does not boot, obviously, as it's a "plain" data drive not an OS drive....  so out it comes, re-insert the CF card into my USB CF card reader, under my running XP computer (the one I'm typing this on).

Then, some frustration with Micro$uck's idiot format [non]utility, and I discovered it's simply not possible to do anything other than a data drive within XP using Micro$uck utilities....even their idiot "disk manager" utility was stymied.

What's worse, one of the CF cards was stuck in 18gig mode, from an earlier attempt to clone a test laptop drive (it was only 20gig, and the clone software did not support scaling).  Stupid STUPID windoze utilities had no provision for re-partitioning a CF card.... idiots.  Not even with switches... (there basically aren't any...)

So, back to the interwebs, and a fine, fine utility from HP (free, too) that lets you format *anything* to *anything* as far as I can tell.

It easily corrected the partition problem with the one CF card (now back to 32gig).  It let me make it bootable, it even asked for the boot-image files (which I provided-- win98 is as good as any to bootstrap the process).  78 seconds later, and I had a nice, bootable CF card with the full 32 gigs in FAT32.  Good enough to start.

Next, I drug out my Win2k disk, and made a sub-directory on the CF card, and copied the disk into there:  CABS\WIN2K.   

Then, back to the interwebs, to Dell's support site (I often badmouth Dell, but I *must* give them credit:  they are excellent at maintaining old drivers for their old equipment...for free). Download all the available Dell drivers for my laptop and Win2k directly onto the CF card:  CABS\Dell Drivers.

Finally, tell XP to eject the CF card, to make sure it has written all it needs to...remove it, re-insert it into adapter, tray, laptop.

Power on....wait-wait--Viola!  A DOS prompt!  Yaaaay!

Now, to hunt for, and find the setup utility that runs from a DOS prompt... turns out it's in the i386 folder, and is the WINNT.EXE (I think that was the one...).   (at this point, I had no CD drive, no mouse, no nothin' ....bare old MSDOS 7.x)

Now, I glance down, and see the DOS-blue and white setup stuff is finished, and wants me to do something....wait a min...okay, it's trundling along again.

(aside:  I had forgotten how convoluted Win2K is to setup, and how many "setup" steps it needed.....*bleah*  No wonder they replaced it in only a coupla years... )

The total cost for this project, so far?

Used older laptop:  $50
32gig CF card:  $90
adapter thingy:  $10

For less than $150, I'll have a laptop without a spinning metal hard drive.  Sure, the CD drive spins, but only if there's something in it.

I have two of these, I'm hoping I will be able to clone the CF card for the 2nd one, once it's fully loaded with all the software.

I'm planning on using the Open Source office software, Firefox web browser, and no e-mail.  If e-mail is done, it will be strictly through the web browser.   Since it's Win2k, and M$ no longer directly supports it, I'll likely remove IE completely, as a precaution.

More later.

[Griffin NoName]

Perhaps you have the makings for a new marketing opportunity. Affordable Heavy Duty TravelTops. You could do a series of adverts like the ones for tampons: I can fly, I can swim, I can hurl my TravelTop from the cliff top and it will still work on the beach.

Spinning metal probably hasn't much of a life left. But the aspect of current technology I'd like most to be shot of is the noise from the fans. Even though we are in a cold snap, my heating is off because my laptop is sufficient to heat the whole room. I haven't done a cost comparison.

[Sibling Zono (anon1mat0)]

There is a caveat that you should have in mind, flash memory has a limited number of write cycles after which it fails. They have been moving that number up (which is why you can get flash hard drives now) but still their life is shorter than regular hard disks. As a suggestion put as much memory on the lappie as possible and try to disable virtual memory or use a small amount (because that will be re-written every time you use it).

[Bob in a quantum-state-of-faith]

There is a caveat that you should have in mind, flash memory has a limited number of write cycles after which it fails. They have been moving that number up (which is why you can get flash hard drives now) but still their life is shorter than regular hard disks. As a suggestion put as much memory on the lappie as possible and try to disable virtual memory or use a small amount (because that will be re-written every time you use it).

I'm aware of those limits.

But due to the harsh vibrations it's intended for?  The spinning metal wouldn't have lasted a week.   That being said, I *do* plan to clone my flash (when I'm done upgrading) onto an old spinning metal drive, so I can easily recover from a dead flash.

I've already run up against the virtual-memory issue, more below.

[Bob in a quantum-state-of-faith]

No moving parts, page 2.

I finally got Win2k up and running, and discovered several gotchas.  The laptop's RAM is only 130meg, so I must upgrade to at least 512 (the max Dell says it will do...we'll see).   I plan on disabling the virtual memory completely, once I have 512.  It's noticeably slow, when paging to the flash.

Alas, I'm going to start over, with regards to Windoze 2000, though.   Late last night (early this morn?) I found this:  http://vorck.com/windows/remove-ie.html

It speaks about streamlining W2k and removing all the junk-ware and inessential crap.

Since I'm wanting to run lean and mean, I think I will do what it says.

But, it involves re-hashing the Win2k image (slipstreaming) and a bare-metal install.

However, the junk it removes?   It should be worth the bother of re-doing everything.

Alas.  Two steps forward.  Three steps back.

The Windoze Dance.

[Griffin NoName]

But, it involves re-hashing the Win2k image (slipstreaming) and a bare-metal install.

Think you are sailing pretty close to the wind here; may we remind you there are underage minors who use our forum ~  Forum Admins and Mods

[Sibling Zono (anon1mat0)]

It speaks about streamlining W2k and removing all the junk-ware and inessential crap.

I was going to suggest this site, going service by service to gain memory, but if you want to go hardcore I'll bow my hat to you. 

[Bob in a quantum-state-of-faith]

It speaks about streamlining W2k and removing all the junk-ware and inessential crap.

I was going to suggest this site, going service by service to gain memory, but if you want to go hardcore I'll bow my hat to you. 

Thanks for the link, though:  I may get around to slipstreaming XP.  Everytime I have to do a bare-metal re-up (once a year or so) I have to re-install all the d~mn service patches.... a nice bootable slipstreamed SP3 XP would be nice to own.

As for the laptops?  I'm currently preparing the old spinning metal as a work platform for my mean and lean Win2k package.

The webspace suggested a nice roomy drive to work from...

20 gig ought to be enough.

It's slooooooooooow though, formatting it via USB...