pendell

Current Hyperfixation: Wizard of Oz

  • He/Him

I use outdated technology just for fun, listen to crappy music, and watch a lot of horror movies. Expect posts about These Things. I talk a lot.

Check tags like Star Trek Archive and Media Piracy to find things I share for others.



cathoderaydude
@cathoderaydude

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"


cathoderaydude
@cathoderaydude

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


cathoderaydude
@cathoderaydude

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


cathoderaydude
@cathoderaydude

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


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in reply to @cathoderaydude's post:

in reply to @cathoderaydude's post:

checked in on this because the timeline seemed suspiciously familiar and yeah, the processor in the Shift was the first revision of what would become Intel Atom, before it officially had a name

wild

in reply to @cathoderaydude's post:

my procedure for taking a backup, was:

  • put clonezilla on a USB drive with enough free space to write the image to
  • (or) put clonezilla on any usb drive, use the "to ram" option, and have a USB drive big enough. I think this worked with the 1GB of RAM in my Shift.
  • boot clonezilla, and try to get to a root shell
  • run hdparm -N to check for the sector LBA sizes for the HPA (the hidden partition for Vista recovery)
  • you'll hopefully see /dev/sda: max sectors = some number/some larger number, HPA is enabled - if you do not, the HPA has been wiped or the HDD has been replaced without a clean image
  • keep both of those numbers safe somewhere, and set it to the larger of the two with hdparm -N the larger number

now the HPA is visible; now you can back it up with ddrescue and clonezilla.

  • mount the destination drive and cd to it
  • sudo ddrescue -d -f -r3 -P32 -S /dev/[device] ./[name]-image.ddrescue.img ./[name]-mapfile.ddrescue.map

Replace [device] with the device you want to back up. The entire device, so sda not sda1.

Replace [name] with the name you want to give the image.

Finally, before you return to the OS, after the imaging is all done, reset the HPA to its original size.

(oh, cohost ate the HTML in the comment. uh, that kinda sucks)

That's... huh. Maybe they put out a BIOS change or there was a revision they weren't doing HPA with. My CLIO110 had an HPA, and was dumped with that method.

Once dumped, I also tried to hijack the fn+f3 restore, but the BIOS/EC disabled the keyboard while recovery was in progress, after the "WARNING DATA GO BYE PRESS F10 TO CONTINUE OR POWER OFF" alert.

"wait, what do you mean, I don't even see the hard drive cable. i see the port on the side of the hard drive, though, so I'll start from there and follow it to see where it goes...oh noooooooooo"

in reply to @cathoderaydude's post:

you have no idea how good it is to hear someone like you, who is familiar with all of this shit, exactly reiterate my feelings on vista.

it had a lot of problems, but my god, half the goddamn reputation was people shoving it onto machines that BARELY RAN WINDOWS GODDAMN XP

folks forget that until sp3 the recommended minimum system requirement for ram in XP was... 64 of god's own megabytes. if you ever ran xp with only 64 mb of ram, you know that was horse shit. hell, same with 128, really, everything up to 256.... and it only really worked starting at 512.

i have a machine with a core 2 duo 2.0 that shipped with vista and it runs like a dream. it looks more coherent and cohesive than every single OS shipped since then, including 7.

it's my firm conviction that in 2006, microsoft released the culmination of years of work that they were incredibly proud of, intending to user in a new era of computing, and the completely undeserved backlash stung them so hard that they went into a downwards emotional spiral that has never ended. i am genuinely not joking here.

i think that was the year that all of the people remaining at MS that really gave a shit said "you know what? you think what we make is so bad, not having even given it a real chance? we'll show you what a bad OS looks like." i think we pissed off a bunch of witches and are on our 16th year of a lifelong curse.

i agree with literally everything you just said.

every single one of my machines at the time, from an Athlon XP 2500+ to a Core Duo (yes, core 1) to a Newcastle (I wanna say, I still have it somewhere) Athlon64 that had ~2GB of RAM ran several, several times faster on Vista than they did on XP. A few of them got decommissioned before 7 came out, but god damn.

superfetch was a fucking miracle, and people going "BUT IT USED ALL MY RAM" to this day deserve every dumbass hack job they get. bummer they've made it less aggressive since. :|

If you need, I could help to translate the random shit required?

And yeah Windows before 10 was an utter pain in the ass to change language of. And it will still linger after, too. No clue on Vista or 7 tho.

But damn that sounds painful. 800 MHz is.. almost nothing, even back then. Putting Vista on that is a torture for literally everything involved

As for XDA... fuck that's a mood. Assholes never care to mainline anything, and every single thing uses weird utils that smell absolutely off. Russian 4PDA is... Questionably better, they try to organize stuff at least, I guess. Wonder if there's anything on this device over there?

I wonder if there are Linux drivers for the hardware these have. With a working battery, the form factor looks like it might be pretty great for playing old DOS games on the go or outside (if the stuff on the screen is visible) in DOSBox.

I'd argue that Microsoft is not without blame for the influx of Windows Vista machines which weren't meant to run one. Microsoft did pander to OEMs despite having a market power to make them ship decent hardware (remember "Windows Vista Capable"?)

Also, it took Microsoft until Windows 7 to turn a Starter edition from "Windows for Uncivilised Natives" to a system properly suited to run on relatively low-powered hardware. I think they were even wary of licensing Windows XP to early netbook makers for a reasonable price until those companies flooded the market with Linux machines.

I am trying so hard not to be an "um, actually" guy here, but there were legitimate reasons to be frustrated by Vista. Off the top of my head, there were:

  • A host of compabitility issues, even with software that was written for XP. While this is expected with any major OS revision and was slowly fixed (especially with 7), the fact that Windows 10 worked with more software out of the gate (even stuff that didn't work well in XP!) shows you how much Microsoft listened.
  • Aero looks nice and I will step up to bat for it every time, but even on systems that could run Vista well, this thing was a performance hog.
  • The UAC or whatever that admin panel was that popped up any time you opened an app was genuinely dreadful. There were workarounds but this was poorly conceived from the start.
  • If you were into PC gaming, say hello to Game For Windows Live! It was Microsoft's attempt at charging people money to play multiplayer games via XBOX Live Gold subscriptions. As you can imagine, this lasted all of 6 months. Unfortunately, the same can't be said about GFWL, which saddled a number of games with buggy DRM that cannot be removed unless the publisher gave a shit to patch it out. Quite a few games from this era are nigh unplayable without gross hacks.
  • Then there was DirectX 10. Along with GFWL, this was a transparent way to get gamers to upgrade to Vista. While it introduced some performance improvements, it also introduced a lot of instability that has slowly become compatibility issues over the years. There's a good reason most guides for games from that era say "stick with DX8 or 9, or bump up to DX11 if you can" when trying to run those games on modern hardware.
  • A bunch of other stuff I've since forgotten now that I haven't touched the OS seriously in nearly a decade. I want to say the Start Menu and File Exporer were a step back, but I'm pretty sure everyone got used to it by the time 7 came out.

And I'm saying this as someone that liked Vista! Any one of these would have been annoying but tolerable, but all of these happening at once was the kiss of death. Microsoft had to rename the entire operating system before people would give it a chance, even though 7 wasn't that drastic a change from Vista in a lot of respects.

Yeah, I agree that the performance problems were the crux of the issue, the other problems I've mentioned were minor quibbles that were ironed out. I always felt there was potential in Vista, but MS threw up their hands and opted for a new revision in 7 once computers caught up. I can't say I blame them.

I'm also glad someone else remembers the launch woes with XP! People think I'm crazy when I mention that XP wasn't beloved out of the gate. I remember people audibly groaning in stores when they found out something required XP around 2001 one or so.

The software issue with Vista IIRC was actually largely due to a switch to the new Windows driver model, which forced manufacturers to produce more compliant software to be approved or risk getting cut off at the pass trying to do something "illegal". Display drivers were okay because they'd already switched to an earlier new model in XP, but printers, networking, all kinds of stuff that used to stick their sticky fingers into the kernel were pretty badly hamstrung. Edit: also adding x86-64 Interop and compliance really screwed things for a while too

That's also part of why Aero suffered so badly. It was an early version of the desktop compositor that's a core component of windows now (you can't even use the GDI compositor anymore outside of some serious group policy stuff). It was all done as 3D planes using DirectX. There was a lot of fallback if your computer couldn't handle it, but people tried running it on Intel Integrated Graphics instead of a discrete solution and game integration hadn't been invented yet

It's funny that people think Vista is a step back from the pre-reset Longhorn vision in retrospect, because it doesn't have ReFS, when it still introduced a lot of the stuff we take for granted (and probably get frustrated by) in Windows 10 today.

also: you don't need to feel bad about correcting someone as long as you believe both of you are speaking in good faith! my default policy here is "I will rescind or delete anything I get wrong" because this isn't the other website, so we aren't in permanent PVP. 👍

I've had a natural tendency to argue on forums and other forms of social interaction since I was a wee child. It's something I've slowly had to deprogram, thus I'm always apologetic whenever I feel the need to chime in with a personal opinion.

Cohost has been a breath of fresh air in that respect, given most people are arguing or discussing things in good faith!