Which version of Windows 95?

If you're currently running Windows 95 on an IBM PC110, I strongly recommend upgrading to Windows 95 OSR2 if you can. OSR2 is an "OEM System Release" of Windows 95 which is not sold to the public, but which is available to Microsoft Windows developers for compatibility testing, as part of the Microsoft Developer Network subscription.

OSR2 solves at least two annoyances with Win95 on the PC110:

• It can power down a PCMCIA hard disk during idle time, without needing PCMCIA drivers to be loaded. This can increase battery life noticeably.
• It has an option that removes the screen redraw when you wake up the PC110 from "sleep" mode.

Little things, but useful.

Amanda Walker

ROM Password

To remove a password

• At the password prompt, type the password, then a space, then Enter.

To change a password

• At the password prompt, type the password, a space, the new password, another space, the new password again, then Enter.

Can I use Graffiti on the PC110?

In short, no. To my knowledge, the only app. that uses the digitizer is Personaware and this is Japanese only.

Is there any way to change the internal 2400 modem to a faster one?

There's no known way to change out the internal modem. What can be done is: run Win95 on a Type 3 hard drive, but when you want to do some serious web surfing, have Win 3.1 on a 20MB Flash card and boot it and then have a 28.8 modem in the other slot.

Sound Drivers in Windows95

Windows 95 will recognize the internal sound card as an ES488 AudioDrive but may not work. If you remove this driver and install the Sound BLaster driver, it will, but you will not get Volume Control on your Taskbar.

A solution is to keep the ES488 AudioDrive driver and just manually change IRQ number from 7 to 5 in Control Panel->System->Devices->Sound..->ES488->Properies->Resources

Does the PC110 pen pad to work under Windows95?

Currently the answer os no. Somebody did work out how to get the pen driver working in a DOS box for Personware, but not actually in Win95 itself.

Also, somebody has got the touchpad to work under Linux, though I doubt anything is being done by that guy to get it working under Windows.
:-(

What about 256 colours in Windows?

Robb Woldman wrote to me recently to tell me of his experiences getting to grips with 256 colours on his PC110. Below is a synopsis of his information.

For those that cannot wait...

• ..the Solution

Firstly, Rob e-maild T-Zone in the States about 256 colour drivers....

Hi Chuharu,

Geri Abaya gave me your name and told me that you might be a good resource for a PC110 problem I have run into. (She said you had something to do with the original PC110 project team?)

Forgive me, this e-mail is a novel. Plese bear with me. I feel you should hear everything I have run through to fully understand the solutions I have already tried.

I hope you can help me; here's the deal:

No matter what I have tried, I can not get English Win95 to run in 256 color VGA mode. I feel that I have exhausted all possibilities and I hope you might offer some insight into this problem for me.

Background on Installation:

First off, let me say that the way I installed English Win95 was that I formatted the hard drive using a "Format D: /s from the PCMCIA slot in my Desktop WIN95 PC. Secondly, I put the HD back in my PC110 after having copied the WIN95 directory from the CD into my PCMCIA HD, and then ran setup. Finally, using a Dos7.0J boot floppy disk, I ran "Sys D:" so that my flash rom remained bootable into Japanese DOS (so that I could continue to use Personaware and the Canon camera that I bought for the PC110.)

Once Win95 was loaded, I changed the ESS interrupt from 3 to 5 to get it working, removed the PCMCIA Plug and Play driver, along with the Joystick, added a COM1 port for the built in modem, and that was all I needed to do to get Win95 running with no conflicts.

VGA Problem:

Here's the problem...

WIN95 detected a Chips & Technology Accelerator. It loaded up in 16 color mode, and when I go into display, I can choose between 16 and 256 color mode. When I choose 256 colors, the system says it needs to restart, and then reboots. No problem. However, in the process of restarting, something happens about midway through the reloading, and the PC110 suddenly shuts down and automatically reboots a second time. Now, it goes to the screen asking which mode you would like to go to. When I choose normal (#1), it reboots back to 16 colors and tells me that there is a problem with the settings for my display adapter.

Okay...that's fine because all the documentation people on the net have sent me told me to remove the C&T accelerator, and go with the C&T Super Vga driver. So I tried that. Now this is the really weird part. When it restarts, it does go into 256 color mode. However, there are two very noticeable problems. The most major of the two is that the bottom area of the screen (just a tiny bit bigger than the taskbar in width) is competely scrambled. Everything else on screen is in 256 colors. The 2nd and more minor thing I have noticed is that when you move the pointer around the screen, there is some minor screen flicker that happens.

I have tried numerous other drivers such as the standard VGA setting, the drivers on one of my PC110 disks that comes up with C&T 65535 9pt or 10pt 256, and even downloaded some drivers of the www.chips.com site but nothing seems to work. Whenever I reboot in 256 color mode, the PC110 just dies during the restart process, and then reloads (the second time) back to 16 color mode while also bringing me back to that mode select menu (safe mode, command prompt, normal, etc.). The only time I have ever successfully got 256 colors in Win95 is with the C&T Super VGA driver but I have already told you the problems with that.

Net Testimonials:

I have put my problem out on the net in the comp.sys.palmtops board. To date, I have received 6 responses. Five of them said that when they loaded Win95, they never had any problem whatsoever. They just toggled over to 256 color mode and that was that. However, before I thought I was just cursed, the sixth response came in. This user (like myself) had just bought a new PC110 and had the EXACT SAME PROBLEM. She is hoping that I can find a solution because she doesn't know what to do either. So I know I'm not crazy.

Is this a hardware defect? It doesn't seem likely because my 256 color mode works wonderful in DOS applications, as well as on the Japanese DOS flash. However, I can't figure out why I would have a problem that 5 out of 6 people didn't have any trouble with whatsoever.

One final thing:

Originally, when I first installed WIN95, I tried it with WIN95 OEM2. When I had the display problems, I reformatted to the Original WIN95. Neither seems to have made any difference. I am still working with the original version of Win95.

Actually, here's what I am starting to hear...

• The 256 color VGA problem is memory related. Everyone seems to be using the same drivers. The fact that it works with some and not with others has nothing to do with the drivers themselves. It has to do with the 20 meg upgrade. The upgrade seems to require some sort of change to the PC110 memory settings. I don't know yet, but my educated guess would be some sort of tweaking and balancing to the settings in the easy setup menu, and the display adapter part of control panel. It's frustrating because I talked to a lady in Hong Kong that had an identical problem; she took it back, and while they were able to fix it (rather quickly I might add), they told her about the memory conflicts but refused to elaborate on what they did.
  
  
• I heard back from Amanda and she thinks that when you install the 20 meg upgrade, there is also a Flash Bios update that needs to be performed somehow. That one, I can't really gather what would have to be done.

This is happening to enough people that I would love if we could either add it to your page, or to the FAQ as an open item or something, because there is some critical information that is obviously being left out of the installation process. Yeah, life goes on with 16 colors, but why shouldn't the PC110 be perfect, especially when the capability is there but the information is not available.

Robb

..the Solution

Seamus, pop open a bottle of champagne!! Believe it or not, we can now close the chapter on 256 display problems in Win95!!!

Here are the patch files, and, some modifcation notes of my own:

First off, let's go through what we have here...

There are 2 files, loaddskf.exe and biosup.dsk.

Loaddskf.exe is a small program that expands the biosup.dsk file. Biosup.dsk contains: autoexec.bat, config.sys, command.com, ibmbio.com, ibmdos.com, command.com and xpatch.exe.

• Format a floppy "format a:"
• Boot up into DOS (I booted up into Japanese DOS7/V, I don't know whether it matters...)
• At a c: prompt, type "loaddskf /f biosup.dsk a:" This will create a system disk with the patch upgrade files. The key file to all of this nonsense is the itty-bitty xpatch.exe.

Now here's the tricky part:

Remember my original problem? Well, let me refresh your memory... My instructions were to boot up with this disk and everything would update automatically. Autoexec runs xpatch and everything should work. Well, it doesn't. I was getting the flashing cursor followed by a 4 and my system froze up. When I type "xpatch ?", I got a message "not yet.".

Here is the way I finally got it to work.

I booted up from the newly created floppy (which if you haven't noticed already, loaddskf /f creates a 720k disk from your 1.44 3.5"). However, instead of waiting for everything to execute and then freeze my system, I hit F5 halfway through the boot process, which gave me a message saying that my config.sys and autoexec.bat were being bypassed. I landed at an a: prompt. I typed "cls" and "enter" to clear the screen (for no good reason other than to follow the original autoexec.bat step by step. I assume this does nothing one way or the other). Finally, I just typed "xpatch" at the a: prompt. This time, instead of a flashing cursor and 4, I got a message "OK".

I cold booted back to dos normally, put the floppy in and typed "xpatch ?" at the A prompt. This time, the response said "completed.". I put my HD back in, and loaded Win95. I switched the display properties to C&T Accelerator and 256 colors. Lo and behold, it worked!

I hope you will be able to post these files to help others who have gone through the same nightmare I have. Heck, maybe for them, it won't be so bad. :)

What's this about a DOS Web Browser from IBM?

WebBoy overview

Compact Flash Information

Randy Stauffer contacted me about how he is using a 15meg capacity compact flash card.

I read of your travel problems using the DOS CIM, etc. Just FYI, I've bought one of those compact flash cards (called smart picoflash in the 110 manuals) with a capacity of 15MB. On it I have a complete Windows 3.1 installation (without some of the junk like character map, etc., and also with no help files), along with WinCim version ? (can't remember). I've also got a remote client for my business email connection via a Citrix WinView dial up. I use the little 4MB flash that came with the 110 for addresses, etc, and intend to eventually install your English PersonaWare modules there. In any event, using the compact flash you can install a mimimal version of Windows along with WinCim and have a GUI for your WWW and Email use. Also extends battery life significantly - gets close to 3 hours using the Sony NP530 series battery.

Thanks for all your work on your 110 pages - you've really managed to bring together all the stuff that I spent hours searching for last August when I got my 110. I can now bookmark your page and dump the hardcopy printouts....

Randy Stauffer

Additional Information.
I got the compact flash at TZone in Sunnyvale, CA (I live in the general area), and it cost around $200 - $250 USD. I got the battery at an Electronics store called the Good Guys here, and it cost around 70 USD.

Setting up Personaware
from and orig. post to the PC110 list by Seamus Waldron.

From the main PW screen hit F12 and select F10, this shows you your Personal Secretary.

The top half of the screen show you what you have to do today.

Top left is Schedule, top right is Information, below schedule is To Do List and to the right of that is your Biorythm for the day.

Bottom half of the screen is what is happening in the Near future.

Left hand side is Schedule, right hand-side is To Do List and Information.

Note :- Schedule is Purple
        To Do List is Blue
        Information is Green

Press F5 and you will be given a "fortune" based on your blood type.

You Get :

        Business (xxx) Money (xxx) Love (xxx)
        Luckies :---
        Lucky Number : x

F6 will display secret information

From the main screen again.

F11 brings up a Setup/Exit dialog box.

        Startup
                Form Shows
                Modem   o Fax
                        o Other [         ]
                        o None
                Alarm   o Schedule
                        o Other
                Secretary       o Auto  Time [  ] : [  ]
                                o Menu

                [ Okay ] [ Cancel ] [ Help ]
        Panel
                Form shows
                Click of Mouse button to start application
                        o Single Click  o Double Click

                [] Exchange between top title and bottom title
                [] Display Help
                
                [ Okay ] [ Cancel ] [ Help ]
        Cancel
        Help
        Exit PersonaWare

From the Main Screen

Choose Personal

First form - Password Input ( I think this comes up after you have setup info for the first time )

                Password [             ]
                
[ Okay ] [ Cancel ] [ Help ]

Second form - Personal

Name [            ]   Blood type [  ]
Birthday [        ] [] Sec.   Something I don't know [] Sec.

Home    Zip [    ] tel. [           ]
[                                   ] <- Address

Office  Zip [    ] tel. [           ]
[                                   ] <- Address
FAX [            ] tel. [           ]
email [                             ]

F8 For Next Page

                     Number
Insurance Card  [                  ] Iss. Day [              ]
Drivers License [                  ] Exp. Day [              ]
Passport        [                  ] Exp. Day [              ]

   Card        Number      Exp. Day       Service
[         ] [           ] [         ] [            ]
[         ] [           ] [         ] [            ]
[         ] [           ] [         ] [            ]
[         ] [           ] [         ] [            ]
[         ] [           ] [         ] [            ]

F8 For Next Page
F7 For Previous Page

Anniversary        Memo             
[          ][                     ] [] Sec.
[          ][                     ] [] Sec.
[          ][                     ] [] Sec.
[          ][                     ] [] Sec.
[          ][                     ] [] Sec.
[          ][                     ] [] Sec.
[          ][                     ] [] Sec.
[          ][                     ] [] Sec.

F8 For First Page
F7 For Previous Page

F1 help F3 Aborts F4 Saves F5 Change Password F7 Previous F8 Next F12 Exit