hello everybody and today I'm going to
be talking about the HP Omni book 800
now this is an interesting laptop I
picked up the other day at a thrift
store for a few bucks it's an ultra
portable Windows 95 era machine that
took some effort to get working but it's
a fun laptop so let's talk about what I
had to do to get this theme working
first of all now the first thing you'll
notice is that the power on here while
it says 12 Vols it's actually Center
negative kind of like the Atari Jaguar
Sega Master System and model one Genesis
and Sega CD and the super famicom now
this is a big thing because the power is
reversed compared to normal power
adapters I mean you can't just plug a
normal one in cuz it'll probably fry the
laptop top you have to use a special
Center negative power brick and this is
an hpf
1044b ACDC adapter and this is the one
that works with this laptop and as you
can see it's Center negative 12 vs which
is what this laptop takes once I got
that though I ran into another issue
which is that the hard drive was
damaged now I was Finding lots and lots
of bad sectors on this drive and it was
unusable but then I took the drive out
and I noticed that in the past there had
been a soda spill and it hit the hard
drive now I don't know if this
contributed to the failure of it or if
it caused the failure of it or if it was
just a coincidence but let's just say it
got around the drive and I pulled this
drive out of the laptop and I then put
in an 80 gig Drive from another laptop
and well then I had to install Windows
98 which I did using VMware but once it
was all done and installed and
everything I then switched the hard
drive in and it started installing
drivers and now this great laptop is up
and working
again now one thing that has to be noted
about this laptop is the fact that there
are no CD or DVD drives or floppy drives
instead you have to go to the back and
plug in a special floppy drive to this
connector in between the Cal and VGA
connectors there's also a scuzzy or CD
Drive Port I think it's either scuzzy or
a special port for the CD drive I forget
exactly which but there's this port that
looks like the same one used for dual
monitor video adapters and this port is
for the CD drive that came with with
this system I have neither of these
however I do have a CD drive which is
similar to the one that came with this
system with its own scuzzy pcmcia
adapter so this is how I'm able to like
load games and whatnot from CDs and of
course you can also use um
pcmcia to compact flash adapters with
this thing too another thing to note
about this laptop is that the Plastics
on this are pretty horrible in fact I'm
going to refocus it now just to show you
so as you can see there is cracking here
and there's cracking there and there's a
lot of cracking on the bottom of the
laptop too so I would not recommend like
taking this around and stuff because of
how poorly the Plastics have aged on
this thing along with the fact that the
holes for the original Drive don't quite
line
up so let's open up the HP Omni book 800
CT
laptop now the Plastics don't sound too
good but at least it hasn't completely
disintegrated whenever I open it unlike
some laptops I've seen at thrift store
so right here you have a quiry keyboard
not the best to type on it it seems a
little bit sticky in some parts probably
due to that soda spill I mentioned but
or it seems at least kind of sticky not
as bad as when I first got the keyboard
out though there's no windows key since
apparently this thing was designed
around the time of Doss and there's the
brightness switch here and there's also
a unique little mouse button and what
that does is I'm going to move the drive
out of the way to show you what it does
is when you push it it
actually shoots out a little mouse that
is controlled by that Rod like there's
no Optical mechanism or anything it's
mostly controlled by that rod
similar to a joystick so I'm going to
I'm going to like also show you one more
thing with this
mouse have to push up here and then it
actually pops up allowing you to easily
use this like a mouse of course the
precision's not as good as even a ball
Mouse but for what it is it's an
interesting way of approaching the touch
pad problem or track ball problem cuz
many laptops had track balls or
touchpads but this had
this very interesting way of approaching
the
issue of course it probably had some
issues such as the whole um it having to
pop out while others there usually a
track Point here or touch pad somewhere
track ball somewhere but let's turn on
the laptop
now now unlike power books this isn't
just a signal to the OS instead it turns
it on and then when you push it again it
puts it in standby mode instantly L it
does not turn off the machine and you
have to kill power to it if the machine
doesn't turn off or hit the reset switch
which is located right next to the mouse
recessed in so let's turn on the machine
cuz this is a fairly interesting machine
to talk
about I'm going to hit F2 to get into
the BIOS now you don't have much time to
get into the BIOS on this machine
because this is a very fast
bios now as you can see this bios does
suffer from the 8 gig problem which is
why I installed easy Drive 9.03 W onto
the drive so it will automatically boot
from it and I'm going to hit alt cuz to
change stuff it's made similar to that
of a Dos program at the time you can
change your date and time PC
identification passwords enable or
disable
cash
um you can enable or disable that status
panel right here you might want to if
you're running games cuz it can kind of
get
annoying and you can
choose what to show like battery status
hard drive status only one active I'm
going to change it to that just because
usually this thing does not this thing
does not have a hard drive light while
you usually systems from this time
would input output you can change your
comport it's a shame there's no mouse in
here by the way you can change your
printer port printer port
mode keyboard setup external
devices um you can choose stuff with the
sound Port I made the volume all the way
Max and you can also change irq dma that
stuff same stuff as with a normal bios
from this
time and I'm going to go
save like I said this thing reboots real
quickly now first thing I'm going to do
is I'm going to go into dos mode to show
you how great the Doss compatibility
is now I'm going to go to
CD SL DK 3D and I'm going to run Duke
Nukem
3D and as you can hear it's got that
opl3 sound ship in it or a clone of it
cuz it's got the DN it's got the ESS
audio drive in it it's got the ESS audio
Drive sound chip in it which means it's
got a clone of the
opl3 and this is all in a nice compact
laptop that's about as big as maybe a CD
that's how big this thing
is this thing's about as big as a CD
case at least sizewise I mean see how
big this is not very big at
all so as you can see from the
screen it looks very great in person I
mean it's
an it's an 800x 600 active Matrix LCD
and it looks stunning in person
especially when you consider that this
was a Doss laptop or Windows 98
laptop I've got some other games on here
too
now I'm going to run Tempest 2000 on
here and as you can see it works pretty
great on this machine
too with that opl3
sound look at this this this laptop runs
your dos games really
well as you can see it's not blurry at
all it's got the old sound chip in it
the only issue would probably be with CD
based games if only because of how um
that
pcmc uh CD drive Works Al if you're
trying to run a game off the CD drive
you'll have to find a way to run it off
the hard drive only but other than that
this game works great on this system
really fun game really good game really
great laptop so all in all this R laptop
runs dos games
amazing and personally this is probably
one of my favorite dos laptops
now and like I said this scene reboots
real
quick that's how long it takes for the
bio to
finish and as you can see it's booting
Windows
98 and as you can see this mouse is kind
of a joystick like Thing by moving it
around you move the pointer around on
the screen as
well but it works pretty well for what
it
is and so um yeah this is Windows
98 it's got everything runs pretty well
and this is considering that this is a
pennium MMX 160
MHz with about um with exactly 48 Megs
of ram so for what this is this is
actually quite
good like sure it's not the highest spec
computer but runs 98 pretty
well and it's running solitire pretty
well too of course because anything can
run soliter pretty well
and because you can see it it's very
clear very nice active Matrix
LCD I'm going to shut this I'm going to
restart this scene and show you one more
thing that's interesting about this
laptop in
particular and go to a step-by-step
confirmation
no
no going to run
something now this laptop can run dos
demos pretty well too well about as well
as a penny of MX 166 with a neomagic
video chip can
run going to load
this I still need to add that to my uh
autoexec.bat
sounds not real loud but as you can
see it's running fairly well and it's
running on this laptop this old dos demo
is running on it so all in all this
laptop is pretty great if you want to
like use like a Tracker or play DOS
games on the go but the only problem is
just like any old laptop this age the
build quality quality is kind of aged
poorly because of all the Plastics aging
and getting brittle but other than that
this is a great kind of laptop for SE if
you treat it well and you want to like
go somewhere and you want to use like ad
lib tracker but if you're going to be
like going in places that might trash
your laptop up I'd go with something
slightly bigger or more rugged like a
ThinkPad or Dell attit to
CP but all in all this is a pretty nice
laptop for all things considered I mean
this is a small Ultra portable 10-in dos
laptop you don't see too many of those
around especially not in this form
factor and of course you can also plug
in CD driv some ethernet cards here so
all in all this is a pretty nice um Doss
Windows 98
machine this is pretty good for that
purpose and especially considering this
is the MMX version with the p with the
active Matrix LCD and the MMX chip and
everything so all in all very
interesting piece of Hardware thanks for
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