trying to back up the hdd on this ancient little UMPC. working on these things feels like trying to cajole a small, injured animal into eating
"honey. hey darling. come on, eat the usb drive. i know you know this is Software. you like Software. come on. please christ you dumbass eat the Software i am trying to save your life you are The Last Of Your Kind please act in self preservation"
the device, by the way. little bastard computer
htc shift x9500. hugely popular in eastern europe for some reason; tons of people over there made custom roms for it and shit.
roms, because: yes, it came with window vist, but it also has a button that makes it switch to a horrifically limited copy of windows mobile that really, really does not want to be displayed on an 8" screen. what kind of monster would do this? answer: HTC
so anyway, the primary chip is an intel mobile processor based on the pentium-m that's so decrepit that it just identifies itself as "genuine intel processor 800mhz". like, that's literally the CPU identifier string. the winmo env runs on a second computer inside with an ARM11 SoC, and the button just KVMs between the two, so theoretically (unlike winmo-on-x86, which is a real thing that CAN hurt you, but has almost no viable software available) it can run arbitrary apps.
thus, there's a bunch of aftermarket shit to jailbreak the winmo env and do just that. people report... varied success. it's not a good idea anyway but i still absolutely had to have the Object, and i was lucky enough to find one in ukraine in perfect condition for a cold hundo. bad battery (owo inflates your cells big and round) but wcyd
i did not realize until after i received it that you can flip the screen up into Posting Angle and the first time i did it, i thought i was breaking the mechanism
oh my god
i opened it up (a waste of time it turned out; the HDD is ZIF) and my first reaction was Wow What a Compact Unit, and my second was Wait Holy Shit THAT'S THE HARD DRIVE CABLE
IT HAS A HOLE IN IT FOR THE FAN
christ almighty
i spent several hours fighting god in order to get vista's UI language changed to english, which required downloading some janky malware-odorous tool i could only find in an IA archive of some guy's website. i didn't want to install from scratch and lose the special utilities for talking to the ARM machine, you see
well it turns out those are almost useless, because the ARM half is also in russian, but there's no fixing that. there's no fixing anything about this thing really
the machine is absolutely dog shit slow. i started out by running a factory recovery, i have a clean install now, there's almost nothing in taskman, and it still takes minutes for things to happen. this device is useless, no further discussion warranted, but i'll keep talking anyway.
you know how vista is remembered as a total clownshoes embarrassment that pretty much ruined microsoft's reputation forever? 100% of that impression is due to shit like this: HTC sold this system with Vista, on an 800mhz processor and a single fucking gig of non-upgradeable ram.
if you give vista even a gig and a half, it will run beautifully, especially on a CPU that isn't six years out of date. no matter what trickery the weird prototype Atom in this thing might have been doing, 800mhz simply wasn't enough to run any modern OS in 2006.
at least here there's some excuse, because the thing's ultraportable. but PC vendors all did this, even on full size desktops. they were unwilling to admit that they couldn't sell modern systems for the prices they'd been selling low-end XP machines, so they just put Vista on PCs that were incapable of running it correctly, and whatever microsoft is guilty of - which is a lot - they still didn't deserve the outpouring of hatred produced by this act. it wasn't their fault.
regarding the winmo mode: it looks like it's in pain, being displayed on a screen this big. it's clearly not meant for this and it hurts to look at. I read even before I got the thing that the winmo mode was super barebones and almost useless, and it sure looks that way, but I haven't really been able to explore it because it's in russian.
100% of the results you get when trying to find info on changing the language on this thing are from xdadevelopers forum, which has a... very specific kind of uselessness. the kind of answers you get when an adult - who has a sense of what time is worth - makes a request of a teenager - who has no concept of time whatsoever. but what i've taken away from it is "the ROM got baked in at the factory and there is absolutely no way to use an official tool to change it; good luck, loser."
all the solutions that do exist are typical "XDAdevelopers forum" shit. you're told to "liberate" the device, and the instructions for that are to just google "modaco liberate shift." then you're told to "install hardSPL." and then... "flash any custommade rom in this forum"
xda developers is a forum full of 20 year olds who do nothing except sit around making inscrutable alterations to portable device firmware. it's like a factory for churning out "windows xp gold edition" sludge, except it's all android and winmo, and the alterations are always a total mess. there's like 500 different 'projects' that all overlap, none of them do what you want, and the threads all look like
zeroPeter's WMO61 RUU iTSP Fixpack 2.6.1r {RELEASE}
===============
VERSION 6.1 - FINALLY OUT!!!!!!!!!
instructions for install:
[30 step process with 9 warnings to "NOT forget this or you will brick device!!!!!"]
and now you're done! sound does not work. gps app starts but gps does not work
in short, this is a fool's errand. there is no way to fix this, because despite the hundreds of thousands of man-hours that have been poured into making the same hasty hackjob over and over in an attempt to become the Scene Hero who finally releases the Golden Rom that everyone accepts as The Objectively Best Experience Of This Device That Was Bad When It Was New, not a single person ever spent a second trying to figure out how to just swap one factory rom for another, because their very first thought was "hhngnggnghghh how do i turn this into A Terrible Shitty Slider Phone That I Already Own, i have to make it uninteresting i haaaaveee tooooooooooooo"
it's much like the flat-out pavement-pounding rush to get every single new Device that came out in the 2000s fully Jailbroken so that someone could... install linux on it, stripping every ounce of identity, and turning it into "a Screen that's not as good as the other ones i have, running the same OS i can run on my pc, but slower, with fewer resources, and a worse interface, and which i will never use since i just have my PC, and i can just use that"
anyway, besides the ARM side of the machine, and a very crappy windows tool for making a few settings adjustments and resetting it, the only other thing on here is "microsoft origami." i guess this is yet another of their abortive projects from the mid 2000s. they wanted to make this unified UI experience for multimedia tablets (remember, iphone and android didn't exist yet, we were a young species) and the end result is this big floaty fullscreen app with a bunch of media players and a My First Web Browser kind of thing. idk. it's incredibly slow, janky, and looks like indecipherable mud on this screen.
i should mention: in at least one picture you can see what looks like dust all over the screen. those are randomly dispersed dimples in the cover. i suspect whoever owned this thing before me was using a ballpoint pen as a stylus and permanently indented the display by angrily jabbing at it because it was so slow
my love affair with the htc shift is fading