Thanks to Crucial for sponsoring today's Magical computer shenanigans.
Hello everybody, and welcome back to the happiest channel on Earth.
Now in today's episode we're going to be taking a look at the Disney Netpal.
That's right -- a Disney laptop from 2009.
Now, it's worth noting that this right here was not Disney's first
attempt at slapping their logo on the side of a computer.
That occurred back in 2004 with the release of the Disney Dream Desk PC.
Which was a $600 Disney desktop computer
but who am I kidding, you've probably seen Linus's video on that thing already.
This time around, Disney decided to partner up with Asus to create
a netbook back from the ten minutes when these things were popular.
It sold for $350 and came in two different colors with very Disney-sounding names.
This right here is the Blue Magic Disney Netpal
and right here we have the Princess Pink Netpal.
Spec-wise they're exactly the same on the inside.
They've got an Intel Atom running at
1.6 gigahertz, a 160 gigabyte hard drive, and one gigabyte of RAM.
Now it's worth noting too that there was another model of the Disney Netpal
that was released exclusively through Toys "R" Us and it- basically the only
difference between it, is it replaced the 160 gigabyte hard drive
with a 16 gigabyte SSD.
So in the midst of the Great Recession,
if you had 350 dollars to spare and wanted to
buy your kid a computer, well,
Disney was certainly here for you.
Now, what on Earth could you do with these things?
Well, I mean with them being netbooks you can...
browse the web, read email, do some light office tasks,
but all that sounds pretty boring to like, a seven-year-old.
What would they want to do with this?
Well, Disney did include some custom software on here
that we're going to take a look at in a moment,
in addition to some themes that you could use to customize the
Windows XP installation on here.
Yes, these things ran Windows XP -- pretty typical for netbooks -- but
I just found that interesting because the Disney Dream PC five years prior
also ran Windows XP so, yeah.
Just take with that what you will.
Now in terms of design, the only difference between this
and, like your standard Asus EPC netbook
from this time -- in fact these are EPCs, if I don't bump the other one here --
this is an EPC, and Asus certainly sold other EPCs with similar hardware.
So, the main difference here -- really the only difference -- is cosmetics.
It's just the Disney tax, pretty much.
You know, you've got this design here with the Princess Pink one,
you've got these flowery things and hearts and a Disney princess right here.
The Blue Magic one looks like they just slapped a Disney logo
on top of a blue Asus netbook so it looks like really lazily done,
but they actually did implement a little design
by taking the Mickey Mouse head and kind of making it
this pattern here in the background.
So, yeah it's- it's something at least, but, I mean still.
This definitely looks more like
just a standard laptop whereas this one is definitely more colorful and vibrant.
Now in terms of port selection, again both of these have the same hardware,
same port selection and all of that.
On the left side you've got your ethernet jack,
that's what's hiding behind here; you've got two USB ports
and a microphone and headphone jack;
and on the right side you've got an SD card slot, another USB port,
your lock, and you have a VGA port and your power port right there.
Now opening this thing up, you'll see that it's
going to be your pretty standard fare here on the inside, although
this thing has certainly seen better days. It's missing a lot of keys
and the space bar is really, uh, jacked up. But yeah.
You got your track pad, which blends into the palm rest here,
and you see that design from the front kind of is in here as well.
Disney logo right here where the OEM logo usually would be, and then they also,
for the webcam, implemented a Mickey Mouse emblem there.
Uh, yeah. So that's kind of clever, probably the
most clever thing on here, I would say. So, there you go.
And we'll just take a look at the inside of the Blue Magic one as well,
just to give you a little bit of a comparison,
but of course it's going to be the same exact setup just with a
black bezel instead of a white one.
Which I personally like a lot better but,
I mean, I certainly think the white ones fit in better with the pink design here.
And again on the trackpad and palm rest
we've got that same pattern design from the lid of the laptop.
So, there you go.
Now, interestingly enough, for whatever reason,
the person who owned this prior to me decided to install Raspberry Pi OS on it.
They went specifically with Raspberry Pi OS.
So that's what this is running right now, whereas this one is actually running the
original install of Windows XP with all of the software.
So we're going to be using it to demo what
we have installed on the hard drive,
though I will have a link down below to an image of the restore CD
that somebody very graciously uploaded to the Internet Archive.
So if you have one of these and are looking to restore it back to
factory settings, or if you just want to
mess around with it in a VM, feel free to check that out.
But yeah. Let's swap the camera setup and take a look at our
Disni-fied -- Disney-ified? whatever -- Disney Windows XP
modified installation.
All right, now I'll be honest, I was kind of torn between which of these two computers
to use for the software demo portion here, and I decided on the pink one
because, not only is there a copy of XP installed with all that Disney OEM software,
but also because this was used by somebody.
There's user accounts on here, they installed some additional programs,
and so I thought it'd be kind of cool just to explore this a bit and see
what somebody was using this laptop, or this netbook, for.
I know I could have just restored the other one running Linux from that
factory image that I talked about, and perhaps we'll do that in a
future video and go through that process -- if you guys
want to see that be sure to let me know -- but, evidently *chuckles*
somehow this copy of Super Optimizer
got installed on here, which is one of these like,
"Oh my God, look at all these problems you have on your PC, pay us to fix them!"
program, and all these are just like really, like, y'know we've got, like,
invalid shortcuts, no way! and then you fix it now and
I'm sure it's gonna- you have to register it, and let's see how much
this thing costs, it's probably gong to want to open up a web page here.
Look at that! We got Google Toolbar as well. This thing keeps showing up in these videos.
I don't know what it is, man. *laughs* But yeah, so we got Google Toolbar.
Some of these programs will actually "fix" the problems, but it- it's just
scareware to get you to pay for stuff that you don't need but anyways,
we'll just quit out of it for now.
And I found this *laughs* hilarious.
I have to think that this was this kid's parent,
and the kid installed Minecraft on here and they were
playing it so much that the parents just renamed
the Minecraft icon, DO NOT PLAY.
*laughing* Or maybe the kid renamed it
'cause they were bored of Minecraft and didn't know
how to... y'know, remove the icon?
I don't know. But yeah, I just found that really funny.
I think I'm just gonna make a new user account here
for myself just so, uh, *laughs* that we can kind of start fresh here.
Yeah, I know what I said earlier in this clip but I would like to see if
Windows XP does anything different when you create
a new user, kind of and log into it for the first time.
See if there's any like Disney pizzazz or something that happens.
So these are the default icons that, uh, come on the desktop
and here is the default desktop wallpaper
which you'd think would go pretty well with the blue color?
If we go into Properties here and go to desktop, it is called...
"Netpal Window Default Wallpaper". So yeah, really, really great name there.
Asus also bundled a bunch of their EPC
wallpapers as well, so let's see if we can find one here that maybe
goes with the pink a little bit better.
Um. I guess we could go with this white pattern, maybe?
Yeah, that- I guess that kind of works, really
with anything. So yeah, there you go.
And some of these programs like Malwarebytes Anti-Malware and
Google Chrome did not come pre-installed, they were installed by the previous user.
But yeah, there was definitely a ton of programs in here.
And what we're most interested in here to start off with
is Hyperdesk from the Skins Factory.
You see we have two separate themes, one for each of the colors,
so we're just gonna go with the pink one in this case.
And when you apply the theme it will apply the- well, the theme itself,
which will take effect on things like
the Start menu, taskbar, window titles, all that stuff.
You've got custom icons and the wallpaper which,
I think if we go to options here- uh, Oh! I- never mind, there IS a
pink wallpaper, there it is. So we will just apply that.
Yeah, I gotta say, this is a pretty nice theme here.
I mean, we'll go to like, My Documents and you can take a look at the
various icons and how they modified the title bars and everything.
They also centered the window titles, which is a nice touch.
In addition to that we do have some icons from Disney on the desktop as well.
We've got two web shortcuts, to disney.com and to their online game site.
We have Parental Controls, which we'll touch on in a moment.
We also have Radio Disney, which as far as I can tell just
plays Radio Disney on your computer.
So this little player here, you can change through
some skins and like, oh, look at that.
You can also send a shout out as well.
Assuming this even still works; we're not on the
internet right now. But, uh yeah, so you could
apparently type out a submission here, and submit that, and assuming
we were on- "Your information has been sent."
No it hasn't. We're not on the internet.
Frickin' moron. Okay, we'll get out of that.
And, yeah. So Parental Controls. This ties into the... I would say the
main suite of Disney programs that they've bundled on here, and that is
Magic Desktop. Now the Parental Controls portion of that
appears to be just a rebranded version of this Easybits program.
And this is just like an info panel. I don't even know why it's really on here,
because it just literally tells you- this is like going to Help and
About in a program. It just says,
this is what it is, here's the build number,
view the license agreement, and close. That's it.
Because you actually get to all the Parental Controls settings
through this Magic Desktop program. So
we're going to launch this right now.
Now when I launched this off-camera,
this thing takes over your entire desktop, and it actually
locks you out from opening up Task Manager,
like you can't close this program without going into the close option that it has.
What I did there, that's like me pressing the Windows key.
Which is interesting because -- you see how that
flies out, doesn't this look like the charms menu from Windows 8?
I can't press control-alt-delete.
I can't alt-tab.
I can't do control-shift-escape, can I do Windows-key-L?
Okay, I can do that at least, so I can still lock the computer.
But, yeah, there is this menu down here...
Okay, preset password is zero-zero- zero-zero.
Wait a second. No frickin' way.
That's the Windows- i-is this a new version of this or something?
Oh yeah. Okay. So this is an updated version, this was released in 2016.
Yeah, that makes a lot more sense, because I was saying to myself,
there's no way they got all those UI elements right, years
before Microsoft officially implemented them in Windows.
I just heard the word "magic" in Magic Desktop and thought, this had to be a
piece of Disney software because they use the word "magic" in everything.
But no, this is just its own thing.
You can probably download it right now, assuming this company is still around.
The Parental Controls thing here that brings up this About dialog
actually says that it's a Disney-branded version of the
Inspirus platform from Easybits, which I assume
is the predecessor to Magic Desktop here.
And this was the company that Disney chose to partner with to
create the Parental Control stuff for the Netpal here.
And it's not like that was anything unique to this.
There were a ton of companies that had parental control software.
In fact, Microsoft implemented it in Windows with Windows Vista.
Yeah, there are some other Disney pieces of software.
If we go to All Programs and go to the Disney folder,
we've got Mix Central and Pix 3.1.
Now Mix Central was, this is like a music-focused program.
I think it's a media player actually.
Yeah, so you got music, images, videos...
Let's uh, go to- just sample music here. So we'll go to My Music
and we'll import our songs here. And so,
yeah, we can just double click on this.
Or I guess just click on it once. Click here. Play song.
Can't play a whole lot of it,
because Content ID would be on me pretty fast there. So,
yeah, the best way I can describe this, it's like Disney's iTunes.
'Cause there's also a store built into it where you can go to
browse for, like, Disney songs and, I believe, TV show episodes and,
and clips and that sort of thing, Ah, to where you can just buy that
and then you can consume that content right from here.
But yeah, then you can also enter like a mini-mode here, so just like
Windows Media Player had. You know, you can
shrink it down and- can you resize this at all? I guess you can't.
So that's as small as it will go.
And of course, being Disney, they have to
implement Mickey Mouse into like practically everything,
so the seek controls over here...
or the, you know, previous and next song and the play and pause button,
is in the shape of a Mickey Mouse head.
And then you've got Disney Pix 3.1.
*camera shutter sounds*
Got some nice intro animations going on there.
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And you can see it's designed in a very similar way to that media player program.
So you've got the same like, option menu up here,
how you switch between different modes.
So, edit pix, albums, and then this is Bobblehead? Ohh, so you can create- okay.
Yeah we're, definitely have to mess around with this a little bit here.
So let's actually try to create a -- oh gosh, everything is so frickin' large, it's like
all these icons here -- but let's import something.
We'll just go to My Pictures here and... What, d'you just import the entire folder?
Is there anything in My Pictures? I mean there should be. Yeah.
I mean it's not even showing up as like a folder that we can expand.
Yeah, what's that about? Can you only import certain file types?
I mean but these are, what, like JPEGs, right? They're JPEGs, why- what th- well,
why can't we open that up in here?
All right, well I think what I'll do is just open up MS Paint here?
Let's open up the sunset and then we will save that as a bitmap
to our desktop. There we go. So I've got the bitmap of the
sunset sample picture imported in here. Let's just start here with- oh gosh,
what do we want to do. Let's, let's... let's import some text here, or add some text, rather.
You've got a list of fonts here- Oh, *laughing* look at this scroll bar, that's
so fricking tiny. Please tell me that you can...
Oh my gosh. So you can't actually start typing out the name of the font that you want
like you can in a standard Windows dialog. So we got to scroll down here,
and then we gotta find the font that we want.
Not that one. Can we at least do the arrow key up?
We can't do that either. All right so- loo- what is that? I'm like selecting-
I'm right here! Oh, that is really obnoxious. That's really bad. Look at that.
That's ter- okay, whatever. We're just going to select that. We got a
slider here. We can make it, like, Yeah, sixty-nine. Yeah, that'll be pretty nice.
So we'll type out our, our font. You know, 'Hello... world....'
I think we just click off of it and then, okay we can resize it
here and move it around. So we definitely want to increase that. Oh, look
at that. That's amAzing. Oh isn't that beautiful, we can rotate it
a little bit. Let's go with a colorize. Oh yeah, there we go. That's, that's amazing, okay.
And then maybe we'll change some of these attributes as well... yeah. I think that's looking
like a beautiful image so. I think we're ready to save that. So let's
save this masterpiece. Oh, we have to export it, that's right. So, we just saved it, like
in this collection here in the program, so we can open this back up. Definitely want to
go with 'high'. Location... and we'll just do it on the desktop, that's fine, export it there.
And there we go. There's our masterpiece and
it saves it as a JPEG! What is that?! Now can
we open this up? Because if it can't open an image that it itself exported that is about the
dumbest thing that I've ever seen in my life.
Okay, so it's definitely something with the sample photo... uh, that it just
does not like. 'Cause again, I mean I can go- maybe it's- with it being in
the My Pictures folder? I don't know, like let me try to- or no, well I already made a
copy of it, right, on the desktop?
Or no. I don't think I did. 'Cause that's the one that we modified and
opened up with Paint and then, you know, saved and everything. So. Go to
My Pictures, and then just drag like, Blue Hills out to the desktop here. OH!
There it is! So it's just because it's IN the Sample Pictures
folder? Or in My Pictures, and then inside the Sample Pictures directory inside of that? That's
really odd. 'Cause you can't- like I'm double-clicking on this, I can't get inside of it,
it doesn't show any options over here. I can expand the folder. Like, the documents
here, you know I can expand that. There's a folder in here. I can't expand that so
for whatever reason it doesn't like pictures in My Pictures, which is where
you would save... pictures to, usu- tha- okay, that doesn't really make any sense-
*beep*
All right. So last but not least, let's see what this
Bobblehead thing is, because I'm really curious about this.
So, you can pick either a video or a postcard to customize, so...
let's just go with video I guess? Oh I see, so it's putting your
face in... the video or in the postcard. So,
"Select the heads you'd like to use...."
Oh, I guess we have to make a head down here?
So, we don't have any photos of people on here so we're just gonna pick like,
*laughs* We're just gonna pick the Blue Hills sample photo here, and we'll
say like that that's the head and then we'll. Uh. Cut it, I guess?
And yep, there we go, that's the head *laughing* we cut out.
"Select the chin and the bottom lip."
Okay. So this is gonna allow the mouth to m- oh my gosh, this is going to be amazing.
Okay, that's fine. We'll finish *breaks off laughing*
And then we have to do that with three of them?
You can see how this program can be just... abused to do things that it was probably
never designed to do. So, what do we do, do we drag them
up here? Like how do you, um... how do you get them, 'cause-
Okay you just have to double click on them. So I, I don't want this one.
So we'll select that one and that one. And then hit next. And...
Oh my gosh, you can customize it with accessories.
Oh no. Oh gosh. *barely contained laughter*
Okay so let's just do that. Let's get- *snort of laughter escapes*
this like birthday party hat thing? and we'll get these-
*snickers* these sunglasses. Oh my gosh. This is so bad.
[composed] And then for the last one...
Okay, that's all the way to the right on this list here. So we'll go
all the way to the left, let's see what we got.
Okay, so we got some more sunglasses here. We're definitely going to grab
those. You know what I think we're just gonna *small laughter breaks through* go with that.
We're just gonna pop the sunglasses on there.
*pfffff* Oh my gosh.
[composed] Oh it has to install... something for it to actually work, okay.
The installer just says Disney Pix 3.1, so... I assume it's a component of it
that it didn't install by default.
Oh no. So it's play- *is cut off with laughter* So it is playing music- This is the most
ridiculous thing that I've ever- All right, we're just gonna pause that. I'm not sure if that music is
copyrighted or not but, we're absolutely saving that. Let's just export that masterpiece there.
So. Yeah. That- that's just one of the video templates. There were a bunch in there.
And I can hear the fans spinning up. Oh my gosh, I wonder what- let's do a
control-shift-escape here. I'm curious what our performance is looking like, this thing is-
Oh, yeah, that CPU is being maxed out.
♫♩
There we go. You know what this reminds me of? Those Windows desktop dancers.
Like, a hundred percent. I mean, just seeing them
dance around in this video here is, is what made me think of that.
So we'll close out of that, and... let's maybe do another one just
before we end off this video, I'd like to do the postcard thing. So, I assume it's
going to be, like the same process, just with a still image instead of a video.
So what's this one here, "Love". Oh boy, this is going to be amazing. Okay, so
select the "Love" one, and we'll- *laughs* we'll pick these two here.
And we can customize them again so, you know, we'll
put like the sunglasses o- this is about the best-
*succumbs to laughter* Like, I don't know whose idea it was
to make this, but this definitely has some... potential, I think, to be a meme or something. Just
having people go in here and making all sorts of just ridiculous-looking faces.
'Cause you can use any image, obviously. You don't have to use a face of somebody,
you can just take a- like, a static image of a scenery
*laughs* like the sample photos here, and then it just- *laughs*
Oh my g- really, Disney? You have to put your copyright info in here, come on.
That's really obnoxious. Now wait a second, can you play it?
Is there motion? I wouldn't think there is. I mean, nothing's happening.
I don't know what exactly that's here for, because it's just a postcard.
I guess maybe they didn't bother to remove these controls from the postcard creation?
And they just left it in here? But.
We can save this, and this should save a lot faster than the video,
so let's just export it. And, yeah, there we go, already done.
So we'll open it up in Windows Explorer here... and... there we go.
So this is the photo. We can zoom in on it here.
So there's *breaks with laughter* "I love you." Is that what it says up at the top?
Yeah. "I love you" *through laughter* with these... Oh my God. This is so good.
But like, this is the most- fricking Disney, of course. Classic Disney,
having to put their frickin' logo and copyright text over everything.
Do they have it on the video here? Let's see...
No they didn't! Look at that. There's nothing there.
So it's them just like standing in front of a brick wall with graffiti on it,
and, just bopping around I guess, having a good time.
And.. I'm sure it would look much better if you actually took it seriously and put
faces of real people on it, but I- you know, I wonder what resolution this is. I'm guess-
I mean it kind of looks like it's 360P.
Oh there it is. 800 by 600. And it's 45 seconds long,
1,163 kilobits per second, and it's just over six megabytes in size.
But yeah, so that's the Bobblehead functionality in *laughs* Disney Pix,
which is definitely my favorite, uh thing in here.
And that pretty much wraps it up for the Disney Netpal Netbook thing that exists
and, I pretty much knew I had to talk about it when I discovered this.
So thank you to everybody for watching. If you enjoyed this one be sure to
give it a thumbs up, get subscribed, all that good stuff.
And, as always, I will see you all in the next video.
♩ ♫ ♪ ♬
◢ Captioned by: Pineapples Foster Media Services ◣ ◹ pineapples.foster@gmail.com ◸