Failing (Again) To Make Honeywell Tablet Useful

To follow up on Part 1 of this project, I finally got an operating system onto my Honewell Thor tablet! Unfortunatley, that OS is Windows CE, one of the least useful or effective operating systems ever made. It also appears to be a RAMdisk type of operating system, so any user changes vanish if the thing reboots or the power is lost!
Overall this isn't a very exciting video, it's just me failing to get vintage tech working! Maybe for the next video I'll try out something better and more useful than a Honeywell product... like a TRS-80 laptop or maybe a rock :-)
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[@George-ec7ez]

Honeywell has a promising future in manufacturing coasters

[@bbranett2188]

Honeywell is doing fine with ring laser Gyro technology sales and fire/security alarm panels.

[@Peter_S_]

Honeywell makes most of the handheld terminals used by industry for inventory control and by shipping pickers for assembling your online orders in warehouses across America. Lots of Android garbage tablets these days. Lousy devices but rugged and just good enough for the specialized job they do so they're industry standard. Why are people whining about trying to redesign industrial products to be something they are not and never were? Those terminals are designed the way they are for specific reasons. Don't give the warehouse clerk on a forklift with time on their hands a machine which can craft SQL injection attacks and the like.

[@BionicleFreek99]

Manufacturing E-waste. I'm pretty sure I saw a skit of that somewhere, where things are produced and go directly off the conveyor into the landfill.

[@Iamwangdong]

Honeywell doesn’t care for anyone other than the original purchaser of the equipment. Why would they? The product probably served its intended purpose perfectly and now it’s ready for disposal

[@PU7MZD]

Can't wait for part 3 of this saga when you make this tablet the brain of a cubesat (a very industrial-non-standard cubesat)

[@innercityprepper]

When I was doing IT stuff back in the days of Win CE, those of us that had to support it pronounced it "wince" for a reason.

[@mustangrt8866]

windows Certain Edition

[@TimWochomurka]

I liked WinCE when I was at Apple ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[@zaremol2779]

I'm doing IT in this area now, but with Zebra devices and Android, not as painful at least

[@Will-kp1iv]

Crap Edition. Its not a real version of Windows, completely removed from the desktop version (like chalk and cheese).

[@NotDrDre]

Status: JACKED

[@stevemichael8275]

Very very funny

[@mustangrt8866]

you're jacked, you'll not be able to replace the battery with a custom replacement because it's ridden with error popups to prevent you from continuing to use it. same as windows mobile. a "low battery" or "repair immediately" will popup every 5 seconds

[@Jeff-ss6qt]

After some research, it looks like that functionality of resetting after poweroff is due to a feature that Windows CE has called EWF. It keeps flash storage from being written to constantly in order to keep it from degrading and also helps it boot up faster. You can disable EWF by typing the cmd command 'ewfmanager c: -commitanddisable -live' as an administrator then rebooting.

[@Jeff-ss6qt]

If you want the system to boot into a clean known state on each reboot while keeping EWF active, you can instead make your changes and then run the command 'ewfmanager c: -commit'.

[@lawnside82]

And i thought it was just a bad cmos battery...

[@Jeff-ss6qt]

Though, I might be wrong. It looks like Windows CE 6 runs entirely from memory. Not sure if there's a way to commit to storage on it. There's a Beckhoff website with a bunch of information on Windows CE and other embedded operating systems and devices

[@Jeff-ss6qt]

Apparently persistent storage in Windows CE 6 is possible, but requires modification of the registry and is device specific. Microsoft has the 'File Replication for Persistent Storage' page for some documentation of how that's setup.

[@saveitforparts]

Interesting, good suggestions!

[@carpespasm]

It's a bummer when these embedded machines have such a nice form factor but are so choked down for non-standard hardware and nonexistent software support that they're essentially ONLY usable in the way they were sold to the entity they were sold to, and become trash the second they're not in that environment.

[@ncot_tech]

Now I could be wrong, but I'm sensing an amount of frustration from you when trying to make this piece of e-waste do anything. It's a stroke of genius making it wipe itself when the power goes out. 10/10 good job there. It's like an early 2000s PDA but bigger and less useful.

[@cuoops]

A lot of videos lately, I'm loving it.👍

[@mncam_com]

Ugh this brings me back -- thank you for getting CE running on it. Lots of UI goodies. I wish my laptops had defrost.... Also this reminded me of that cool screensaver thing in like 2005 called Electric Sheep. I just looked it up and it's still alive-n-thriving.

[@koru3920]

I used a variant of those on a forklift. It ran a windows CE that launched an IBM remote client that ran a text based inventory manager. They were pretty slow for most things.

[@patchvonbraun]

The first WiFi standard was put out in 1997, and there were several cards and access points extant at the time. I remember when I first got involved with the IETF around that time, we were all very excited about it. The very first version was based on a frequency-hopping scheme that didn't scale very well.

[@MikeStavola]

I ran 900mhz wifi on a very very expensive business network back in the 90s. It was stupidly slow and the cards were huuuuuge. I think it was called wavenet or wavelan. Or wave-something.

[@joefish6091]

Bluetooth when new it promised miracles such as mesh networking, it took fifteen years for BT to become awesome and useful.

[@thesausage351]

I bought a similar machine to use to run a program for my cars diagnostics. It ran, but the computer couldn’t run fast enough for it to work. I paid way too much but it has a good battery and it connects to the net, I’ll probably take it in my car with a 12v printer so I can print out invoices when I finish a job.

[@aarocka11]

You say that window CE is abandoned, but I can tell you that it runs our relatively new septa key platform validators. Thanks Xerox!!!

[@kbhasi]

Also set-top boxes for pay TV providers that use the Mediaroom platform, as it was originally developed by Microsoft (hence why the remote looks like the XP MCE reference remote design), but Windows CE only gets mentioned on a system information screen in the box settings so it's probably only the kernel being used. I think the client side of the platform couldn't be ported away from Windows CE, though.

[@nrdesign1991]

Siemens industrial HMI panels still run on CE 6.0

[@arjan1995]

And offline GPS navigation systems, apparently.

[@LeeZhiWei8219]

Man. That battery is really JACKED.

[@hatterfoil]

Also, CE does not have same kernel as 95 or NT based Windows. The binaries are not compatible at all. Of course it will not run dos applications. Opera IS chrome. It runs on chromium. It's 5th biggest browser currently, hard to call it obscure 3rd party. It's was never built for CE though. Form major 10, only Firefox has it's own engine.

[@RaduTek]

Opera Mini was built for Windows CE, the Pocket PC variant to be more precise. It's still not a modern browser, but it's far more competent than Windows CE Internet Explorer ever was.

[@markfacebook]

You almost have to stand in awe at just how persistent is was at pulling defeat from the jaws of victory. Even when you thought you finally cracked it's code, the tablet went full Samson Option and wiped itself. I have a feeling whatever use this thing had, it probably was built to be in one spot and never meant to be moved anywhere.

[@Tsaukpaetra]

Yeah it's like Linux's initramfs, you'll need to repack the image with your customizations in order for it to persist if the Windows CE image isn't set to use storage. Windows CE x86 is also a weird beast as not a lot of things are compiled for that either...

[@michaellichter4091]

That brings back memories of a time when I used to write C programs for Windows. I was planning to install Windows 11 on my Raspberry Pi 5, but unfortunately, only a select few have the opportunity to test Windows 11 for ARM.

[@philklc]

The Opera today is not the Opera people loved decades ago. Basically they had their Nokia moment, the Opera brand and company is now owned by some investment group, and the old team behind Opera went to create Vivaldi. Opera had their own rendering engine, Presto. It was faster than Firefox and predates Chrome, but often had trouble with websites that were coded in non-standard ways that the site owners only bothered to test in IE and Firefox. On PDAs and smartphones (before the iPhone), Opera Mobile allowed users to browse desktop versions of websites when the stock browser only let you browse heavily stripped down mobile websites. Opera Mini is a data-saving web browser that rendered webpages on Opera servers then streamed to the user, saving time and bandwidth, allowing even underpowered Nokia bricks to browse the web.

[@danielcamposramos9943]

If it does have a gps, it can be paired with some old school gps win ce software.....

[@danielcamposramos9943]

Another important thing to note is that you need a x86 only Linux version, that should boot. Otherwise maybe an arm version is the way

[@philklc]

The way the WinCE OS was set up is designed for industrial deployments so that the end user can't break the system, and in the rare case they do, a reboot fixes it. Whatever software to persist on there have to be preinstalled and preconfigured in the OS image you wrote to the disk.

[@Allan_aka_RocKITEman]

FWIW: The one thing I really liked about _MS Internet Exploiter_ -- 😉 -- was when printing something through it I could customize the headers and footers to EXACTLY the configuration I wanted. I tend to print a lot of stuff I interact with, so that was a real Plus.

[@processagent5095]

Maybe if you login as administrator and tweak the permissions. Usually employees are kept from installing or making changes to the system. I recently picked up an old XP laptop and I forgot how much work it was to set up a network connection.

[@idiotwithasolderingiron]

Isn't failure awesome? You get the opportunity to learn so much.

[@jmac217x]

Trip down memory lane mentioning Opera Mobile. That was definitely the browser of choice on my Pocket PC in 2006-2007. Really sad to see it vanish. A failed hard drive back in the day may have just contained that very download, but as is with most of this stuff sadly long gone. Edit: Opera is now Vivaldi. Opera is still Opera, but use Vivaldi, it's a long story.

[@GIJOEG36]

If you put your application on the CF-Card, like the IT-Department in the original setting likely did running from memory might be intended. There likely was a software utility to provision CF-Cards with OS and software.

[@Binford35]

I'm definitely intrigued! I would try to get all the drivers for the things that matter off of the working image and see if they could be preloaded into Windows XP embedded image. Proprietary hardware/software/embedded are the worst to deal with. Had to deal a lot with those in the industrial environment.

[@VSteam81]

"We do supposedly have that battery on board. Let's see... Oh, our battery is JACKED"

[@michaelterrell]

Widows CE (Compact Edition) was not designed to use on a PC. It was for embedded controllers. We installed it and the system firmware on the original 'SSD' which was a 40 MB 'Disk On Chip' 28 pin IC hybrid. If you were a programmer, you could write that Satellite tracking software. The Microdyne product only had @K*16 NVRAM to store its software and tracking data. That OS is 18 years old. How many computers from 2006 will run modern software?

[@leonidas14775]

Computers that old, Athlon XP era can run Debian and the latest version of Python. I can think of some projects

[@michaelterrell]

@@leonidas14775 With how much RAM Embedded systems don't have much to spare . None I ever worked with had over 1MB.

[@damian9303]

It was designed for use in conjunction with PCs for productivity tasks, ever heard of PDAs before Windows Mobile with the rise of cellphones?

[@michaelterrell]

@@damian9303 Yawnnnnnn. I bought on f the early Sharp units. It was crap. Vary little memory, and you lost the contents when the coin cell battery died. I've worked on computers for over 40 years. All the way back to the 4004, the 1802 and many early 8 bit processors. RAM is the major bottleneck on older systems. The MITS Altair S100 bus computer only had 256 Bytes of RAM and an 8008 processor. I have a SWTP 6800 with a disk drive. I had a KIM 1 that was used in medical equipment. Handheld inventory terminals that used the Intel4004 chip set, and a digital cassette for storage. Proprietary systems only had the required RAM for their intended application. The fact that it will run DOS or CE shows that it has limited RAM when nothing else works. He needs to open it up and see what RAM chips it uses. Then he can learn its true capabilities. Repeatedly attempting to load incompatible code and damning the OEM does no good for anyone.

[@calebbadger]

It looks like you're running a live image of Windows CE, so it's running entirely on RAM. I'd try taking it apart and seeing if there's some jumpers or some other kind of clues inside about how to override some of the "features" it has.

[@bbranett2188]

Jtag rom flash perhaps?

[@crosleyfiver8686]

You can buy a CF card where you plug in a micro sd card into,I use them for my older Canon cameras, works great, is cheater than going for older expensie CF cards.....

[@hatterfoil]

It's not to make you pay extra money for adapter. It's to make connector water proof in slightly acidic environment and screw secured for vibrations. It's a typical industrial design. It's not meant to be convenient to power cycle either as the software it normally runs should be as close as bug free as possible and accidentally rebooting it in middle of process could be fatal for some mechanical machinery.

[@dktr2]

Those connectors are not an attempt to extort money by Honeywell, but rather a quite logical use of the cheapest available screw-on connectors. After all, this is intended for use in a car where everything shakes; how do you imagine a regular USB or DC plug? Everything has to be screwed on.

[@saveitforparts]

There were so many other options for car connectors they could have chosen. Somehow I've never had a problem with USB or standard radio power connectors vibrating out in any of my cars/boats, and I do some dumb things with my cars and boats 😂

[@dktr2]

@@saveitforparts It's not about whether you had issues or not; it's just that for a particular device to be certified as automotive, it must be designed according to guidelines. Similarly, all connector joints to the PCB in automotive equipment are not soldered but always press-fit.

[@obso1337]

Its a pain in the ass but it'll be worth it if you can keep it out of the trash! I love it!

[@nick9323]

there is a point in leaving wince and cross-compile some freshmeat for it . And must be wince image editor somewhere to change the default

[@hypercube33]

I saw your last video and you can take the disk image and find a WIM file and use DISM on another machine to lay down a bootable image on the CF card!

[@NexxuSix]

10:40 We have these type of tablets on forklifts. Basically, they tie into a WiFi system, and talks to an inventory system on a server. It basically just sends pick orders over a green screen terminal. You can also send a quick text message back over the terminal as well. Yeah, theres really not much you can do with these machines, except use them as a remote terminal… and run Doom at DOS level. Nice effort on your part to tangle with a proprietary industrial computer. Cheers!

[@graywolf2694]

Yeah used to have a win ce mini laptop back in the day and i couldn't get anything to work back then, same problem with everything stored in ram too, i used to just use it for taking notes in school.

[@delimitnc]

There is a Windows CE specific Doom port. There's also a DOSBox port.

[@saveitforparts]

Nice! I didn't know that, I'll have to find it!

[@delimitnc]

@@saveitforparts For sure, no problem! Sorry I was not more informative, I was on my way out the door earlier. Older builds of Chocolate Doom supported it, and I'm sure other source ports did as well. As for DOSBox, I'm having trouble finding resources I know existed (same issue you ran into). You might have some luck with QEMU, and it may be worth checking inter archive for all of the above. (I've had to repeatedly sterilize this reply because youtube really does not want me mentioning something in it for whatever reason.)

[@patchvonbraun]

I think boot-from-USB wasn't that common until perhaps 2008 or so. I recall buying new motherboards in 2009, that didn't have any way of booting from USB. Also, CF cards started to hit the market around 1995 as I recall.

[@danielcamposramos9943]

@saveitfortheparts maybe a usb floppy would do the trick....

[@mindaugasstankus5943]

@@danielcamposramos9943 if motherboard/bios do not support USB boot, it won't boot. On some older stuff USB were handled by full blown Operating System. Could not use even simple input device, if no proper chipset (USB) drivers loaded.

[@paullee107]

NetBSD will be a good bet for Linux, but you'll need drivers for the hardware - I'd think Honeywell would have had them but... fun finding em.

[@guerrillaradio9953]

I will admit, this thing looks AWESOME. I've bought a couple industrial tablets with mixed experiences. iXplore are less locked down than this one (although that's relative, lol), but if it were me, I would attempt to keep the sick looking case and keys (with maybe individual key switches wired to a disassembled mini keyboard but keep the original rubber membrane?), put a raspberry or orange pi in the thing with a huge battery, modern screen and I/O, and enjoy the thing.

[@lyokoboy0]

I did a lot of tweaks for hp jornada and fujitsu stylistic decices running windows ce. Not gonna like id love to get my hands on one of these and poke around to see if they could be made useful. Even as a serial terminal inacar to packet radio would be cool.

[@GingerNingerGames]

The only things I figure you could use this for is accessing a network drive to load/store data such as your inventory system, which is probably how it worked in the first place, or just as a display, if you can host your satellite previews on a web address and use this thing to display it. It's a cool looking unit, and I'm a little surprised no ones made it work, though with that atom CPU you are limited to i383 linux distros, same as what runs on old netbooks and eeePC's.

[@bbranett2188]

If there is a mini pci slot a NIC could be a bootable device.

[@aserta]

Could take pictures of the guts of one of these and pose the question to the wider EE world about retrofitting normal connectors. I'd certainly ditch the WH one for a normal port, if possible.

[@TboneLoyal]

That port can be wired to usb. And I have seen adapters to usb as well. And the com ports can also be wired to usb. I have one of those older mouse. You can find them on old computers as well. Might be able to ship ya one. Think the port can also be to Ethernet and accessed on router.

[@gbinford9009]

Digital Blasphemy! Thanks for the memory. 😂 I spent countless hours browsing through all the sweeeet backgrounds! Even tried to make my own 3d sci-fi landscapes . Nowadays you could “create” anything imaginable with a simple AI prompt

[@joshuahale8621]

Could you use it as a meshtastic command center

[@SevenGC89]

5:33 "We got old Bluetooth 1.0 that goes like 3 inches instead of modern Bluetooth that goes 6 inches" 😂😂😂😂6 inches is a stretch lol.

[@spencerc4110]

Hi, I had a similar issue with an OS wiping to factory on restart, the cause was that it was running as a Live Image and had not been set up as a persistent volume. I'm currently planning a cyberdeck build largely inspired by your videos! Thank you

[@saveitforparts]

Cool! I'm in the process of building an updated cyberdeck right now, posted a sneak peek on Reddit 😂

[@alisharifian535]

Windows CE is not an MS-DOS based operating system. It seems that it doesn't have an emulation layer (like NTVDM in Windows NT/2k/xp/vista etc..) so it fails to run Dos based apps but they have command prompt that looks like Dos but it is just a shell for accepting commands.

[@robsyoutube]

After seeing it shows up as intel X86, You might be able to patch a jmp instruction on the wince kernel to have it load grub instead if you can find the first function it loads.

[@bbranett2188]

Would jtag flashing OS/2 help?

[@robsyoutube]

@@bbranett2188 It seems to OS is on the CF card or an esata disk internally. Googling this unit yeilded they normally have a qualcomm arm CPU with a propriatary bootloader. But saveitforparts got lucky and his seems to have an intel x86 chip according to the one page he pulled up. (The qualcomm one would have a proprietary bootloader). That said if saveitforparts wants to SPI dump the eeproms I might be able to determine enough about it in ghidra to find a normal bios that can be flashed. It might even be doable to build seabios for it if he can also get high resolution pics of the motherboard. (No promises on if suspend/standby will work right). My expereince with ghidra so far has been trying to reverse engineer the infotainment system in my car to bypass the license key check during updates. I learned a heck of alot about it (hitachi made it and it runs VXworks). The big hold up I have had for that specific project boils down to app.bin is hundreds of megabytes and its difficult to figure out what all the functions do. That said I managed to patch the vxworks shell to be enabled and a few other things. I also discovered it has features to record from the radio that are disabled. But something like this is very easy by comparison mainly due to having far smaller files to work with. And by extension less functions to figure out what they all do.

[@すどにむ]

I still don't understand how some of those real hackers chainloaded NetBSD and Linux on some of those CE devices. I know there's no memory protection in theory but it was crazy

[@robsyoutube]

@@すどにむ That's why I suggested going for it after the bootloader loads. I would also probably directly write the linux kernel to flash so you know the start address. I don't know how someone can do this in userspace after the OS loads but im sure someone smarter than I knows how. Honestly just inserting a JMP instruction is a really old trick.

[@melley420]

That looks industrial. What was the use of this piece of equipment? Was it used to control some kinda machine or something like that?

[@pjousma]

At least you got somewhere :) I love the tinkering with it.

[@trickolas78]

I love all of your videos. Please keep the inspiration going

[@FreezyAbitKT7A]

Damn Small Linux? Will it boot from LAN? is there a mini PCI slot?

[@bbranett2188]

That's what I was thinking

[@bbranett2188]

You will need to load the touchscreen, wifi and display drivers into the kernel into the bootable image.

[@MrMins15]

This thing having an ephemeral storage is unfortunate. It seems like whatever you do with this thing needs to get/set data from a local db or site on your network.

[@TechGorilla1987]

@1:16 - this is where a serial breakout box can really come in handy.

[@archloy]

More complex, but maybe, with some electronic and adaptators, swapping the brain with a raspberry like board ? Or send it as a gift to someone you don't like ;D

[@ricardobino7410]

Is the screen usable for other electronic projects?

[@jtaylor37160]

LOL, I installed 100s if not 1000s of these things on fork lifts, they were designed for inventory tracking and nothing else. It powers on and off via a three wire plug on the base. that unit appears to be from a certain cola company that used it for order shipping. It should have come with a handheld scanner and most likely it is one of the units I installed for them.

[@Iron_Condorr]

Can you somehow trade the cpu for an RBpi? or some other SBC? The display and button layout is pretty cool. if you could get them to work on another motherboard? ⁷

[@HelloKittyFanMan]

Yeah, this is unfortunate. How cool that would be with a touch-screen AND a physical keyboard.

[@bbranett2188]

If its ROM based, you may need to jtag re-flash it with a rs232 on a 4pin header on the motherboard with a serial port capable pc. Yes you can paperweight a device this method... but who cares at this point. I sold my old pentium Dell laptop to a collector (with the dock) that was Windows 95 originally. I reimaged as xp. It was very slow. Windows 2000 pro may be a better option.

[@1nico517]

On the plus side you have the beginnings of a decent set of ram mounts though

[@TboneLoyal]

Have you tried proxmox? Since it’s not a native it might install. Basic Debian. And then port containers to it. So it’s specific.

[@tomcooney183]

If you could repurpose the keyboard and screen with a raspberry pi or latte panda or something the form factor makes a pretty sweet cyberdeck

[@furballtiger]

Remove the cover next to the "pen" holder.. there should be a usb port under there, the Thor unit should should show as a mass storage device in windows

[@saveitforparts]

Haven't found a USB port other than the cursed DB9 one on the back. One pen cover has SD and CF slots, the other has a SIM slot.

[@furballtiger]

@@saveitforparts on the usb cable port.. there is provision for usb host and client .... So the cable has a male and female usb connector.. I will dig out the pin out ... As for the internal USB it may only be on the Thor1a variant

[@furballtiger]

@@saveitforparts on the DB9 with the connector looking at you... Pin 1 is the top right and pin 9 is bottom left.. Pin 1 - Ground Pin 2 - USBC-D+ (not used) client usb Pin 3 - USBC-D- (not used) client usb mode.. Pin 4 - 5v usb power output.(Host power) Pin 5 & 6 - Ground Pin 7 - USB_H_D+ (usb host) Pin 8 - USB_H_D- (usb host) Pin 9 - USBC_VBUS (usb host power detect.. not used) The manual calls for an internal USB Mini connector as it lists the Pin out in the service guide If you have the enhanced docking station you will have a DB11 port Pin 1 top right looking at the connector pin 15 bottom left The pin out for that is Pins 1-5 N/C 6 usb power - 5v 7 usb-h2-d+ 8 usbh2-d- 9-10 ground 11 usb-h3-power 5v 12 usb-h3-d+ 13 usb-h3-d- 14-15 ground

[@Wageslave645]

One possible use case for a win CE computer is as a VNC receiver. We have industrial computers that where I work that use displays that have Windows CE built in as a backend to remotely display and interact with control software that is on a Windows XP machine on another part of the network.

[@gorak9000]

Sounds like a security disaster just waiting to happen. WIndows XP, in production systems? OMG. Methinks your boss cares more about buying a beamer than he does modernizing his business

[@Wageslave645]

@@gorak9000 Trust me, they are air gapped systems that won't ever see the outside Internet. This kind of equipment is worth millions of dollars and can't just be replaced when the OS it works on hits end of life.

[@jefftapper4799]

I wouldn’t be so quick to fault them for using those connectors. That unit was designed for use on mobile equipment with high vibration. Probably why it also runs off of CF storage since SSD was in its infancy at the time. A USB socket would be unreliable.

[@XMguy]

Honeywell is absolutely crazy with their connectivity. I have a ~wireless~ thermostat from them. However it’s wired via power from the same wiring a normal wired thermostat is wired by. But it communicates with the main module and the internet wirelessly. Minus the network gateway. Their wireless network is called Red Link.

[@Architector120]

I had one of these back in 2009-2013, Debian 5-6 worked fine on it... but as far as I remember there was a problem... the touch screen doesn't work out of the box, I had to configure it manually..

[@acli9704]

there is graphical linux for operating machines (cutting metals, wood,...) don't remember the name of distro, but maybe it will work somehow. mostly for operating motors like in 3d printers, turning machines. saw that one guy made video instruction how he made it from old pc

[@stelscarrot]

Internet Explorer actually pretty good browser, its more about drivers. I have used it for quite some time until Microsoft made it re-route to Edge. But when I tried to run Chrome on both old windows xp and linux it was unable to open new sites. In some cases I was able to fix it with new drivers, in other I still clueless. For instance JavaOS (ancient linux one) can't work with modern sites at all with different browsers. The main suspect - maybe glibc wont allow full network driver updates, cant figure out a way to upgrade it, as dependencies require new glibc, and forcing update of either dependencies or glibc bricks the terminal until reinstall.

[@ThatOneTruckGuy]

The HP iPaq I have does the same thing...Once power is lost it resets everything. It did have an internal nimh coin battery so that the memory is kept incase your battery dies or while you swap batteries..but sadly the one in mine failed. Edit. I forgot to add it also has a 128 meg internal flash storage..called the ipaq file store....that does not get wiped after power loss...which was a good thing to add...place to keep files in case it dies.

[@thecriss88]

The biggest problem with those old junk computers is that you can basically buy a second hand, cheap android smartphone for $50 that would have 10x more computational power (and working wifi)

[@bbranett2188]

That's not the idea here. He wants to make this device useful, instead of hazardous waste recycling it.

[@thecriss88]

@@bbranett2188 oh I get that, after all the purpose of those videos is entertainment. The problem is that the most efficient way of "using" those devices is to ecologically recycle them.

[@Alli250189]

Modern bluetooth: 6 inches. This cracked me up

[@WillOnSomething]

Heh, i've never seen Windows CE running on real x86 hardware, outside of demo builds, and the MSNTV2. Most CE devices are ARM-based

[@PhattyMo]

Does the SD card slot work now? Maybe it doesn't wipe that,on reboot. Use the CF for the OS,and SD for all of your other stuff.

[@lolbird_]

I wonder if you could have a bootloader like grub on the compact flash that loads a linux install on the sd card to bypass only being able to boot from the compact flash

[@csparty11]

What you could do is take the drivers out of that WinCE system, move them to a nas or a webserver, then try to install windows xp on there and use the drivers.

[@bigguyprepper]

i wonder if theres any ham radio tools that would run on it. because of the external pins it might make a great hamsat or RDF tool

[@trevorlbeck]

I used to use the same one with i was on a forklift they were nice and better than the handhelds

[@Martin42944]

I thought the opera bit was going to be an ad read… they’ve been trying to make a comeback with gamers and advertising a lot on KZbin

[@Capt.Pikles]

They used to be a great browser, but then they got bought out, bundled in a VPN that has questionable security and now I refuse to recommend it to anyone. Mozilla or bust.

[@homeserver32]

most windows ce apps were compiled for arm, superh or mips so you're gonna struggle quite a bit finding x86 apps. you'd be better off with a gps or a pocket pc

[@WheelieGreenKeir]

It could be that the sd card you are using is too big in capacity, many older devices won't be able to recognise cards bigger than 32gb, i have that issue with an old gopro. I'll be at Open Sauce too, either exhibiting or just as a visitor depending on if my folding photobooth and makers build roulette are accepted.

[@xeneomorph]

Yeah he needs to get 16gb or 32gb since that most likely is a compatibility issue

[@mindaugasstankus5943]

Old SD card reader won't recognise above 2GB (sometimes 4GB) card or partition. exFAT can fail too. Some old readers won't read SDHC or newer, won't recognise card with UHS bus and above. SD spec must be like v1, v1.1. Some industrial stuff using decade older standards compare to end-user goods/products. Lookup 'SD compatibility table'. Backward comparability lesser and brakes further you go.

[@philklc]

Get SD cards 2GB or smaller, to be safe. Larger cards are called SDHC or SDXC and are not supported by old card readers.

[@sirkyoj1]

I work with these everyday. We have them mounted to a reach trucks. Reach out to me if you want a compact flash card that is ready to go. We use cheap serial to usb dongles for a mouse. Those antenna connectors for the wifi are most likely not connected internally. edit: I HATE these things

[@saveitforparts]

Thanks! I have a couple things I'm trying and sent one off to somebody who might be getting Linux on it, I'd like to see if I can do something with it that way rather than deal with CE :-D

[@sirkyoj1]

@@saveitforparts we have another model that runs in XP. They don’t have the screen defrosting. I have never thought about putting another OS on them. We use them for putty connections to scan labels in a warehouse.

[@Corvid]

Dunno about more modern tech, but my 90s Enqsoniq ASR-10 sampler has an aftermarket SCSI drive that takes CF cards... and it literally works with 1 in 10 CF cards. Same sizes, btands, types, only a small number work, no idea why!

[@すどにむ]

I thought you might be within age bracket of CE but I guess I'm old now, Windows CE is not a "real" as in runs Win32 apps. It's a completely different thing mostly for handhelds with similar GUI and API as the desktop sibling, like what iOS is to macOS. So regular Windows exes don't run. You'll need x86 builds of CE exe, that's rare. Most of them are for ARM PDAs.

[@saveitforparts]

I've had some experience with Palm OS and Windows Mobile, but CE was always kind of the weird useless option for the pocket PCs I messed with.

[@すどにむ]

Well, it's predecessor and bare-bones variant of Pocket PC and later Windows Mobile 5/6, and ultimately WP7(but not 8), so CE is naturally the least advanced.

[@richardrussell791]

You could use it as a dumb terminal. It has a DB9 RS232 port, and the Windows CE has a terminal program.

[@ahbushnell1]

Windows CE was Microsoft's attempt at getting into embedded systems. It was a failure.

[@すどにむ]

It wasn't, CE was super popular for industrial control panels and restaurant menu devices. MS shut it down and handed all the market share to Android and that was braindead move.

[@ahbushnell1]

@@すどにむ I disagree. It was slow and bloated.

[@すどにむ]

@@ahbushnell1 - Runs on potato with no memory - Slow and bloated pick one

[@drewynucci9037]

So if you take the original disk images off the website and run them through something like poweriso and use the dism tools, it’ll extract the wim to windows folders with the drivers and what not into a “mounted” folder… just copy the contents of the mounted image and put it on a boot drive…

[@drewynucci9037]

You can also extract and load all the drivers of the system… just make sure whatever you do backup everything the internet archive…

[@cybrshdw5465]

i wonder if its possible to use Network Boot \ PXE on the device? could be something to look into

[@soupbrina]

Are you able to run any sort of Linux on it? I'd assume you could use another device to install something like Damn Small Linux, Puppy Linux, etc. onto that CF card then boot it from the tablet? I'm happy to help if you've got any questions, I love messing with weird old tech!

[@MrWaalkman]

Slashdot? That takes me back...

[@southsko]

did you try thermite?

[@jonher4573]

I would try to get a lightweight linux distro to run on this thing - its typically the best bet for abandoned hardware

[@saveitforparts]

Part 1 was me struggling to get any Linux distros to boot on this!

[@ZakHooiTM]

Would like to get my hands on one with a dock. I'm sure I will get XP or 7 running on it

[@BigPicture-s5q]

Lol you played doom on that,thats awsome.

[@StarlancerAstro]

Battery status jacked made me laugh way to hard😂