Here is a quick rundown of the mods and hacks I did to my mini-lapop, Sony VAIO U101. This is a quick intro to the U101 w/ specs
Hardware Info
CPU Mods
It is an older machine and as such, performance is limited with the 600mhz Celeron.
I fixed this with a little overclocking, at first tried software overclocking but that did not net me much improvement as the clock generator was not PCI bus locked leading to instability at low overclocks so I decided to do a hardware mod. Referencing the datasheet for the Clock Generator made by ICS, part number ICS950812, it showed that pins 54 and 55 controlled the FSB. I was able to change the FSB from 100mhz to 133mhz, a 33% jump in performance. This also overclocked my RAM from the normal DDR133 to DDR176 while keeping the PCI bus at the 33mhz spec and providing a rock solid overclock to 800mhz. I was able to do this because the Celeron cores are just newtered Pentium M cores, half the cache is disabled as is SpeedStep. SpeedStep allows the processor to dynamically change the multiplier and CPU voltage to control power consumption. It bothered me that the CPU was always running at full power and I figured there must be a way to enable voltage adjustments and low and behold after much googleing I found a small utility called CPUMSR that allowed me to unlock voltage adjustment (but not the multiplier, this will never be unlocked) and I was able to reduce my voltages from 1.004V stock to 0.876V at 800mhz and 0.780V at 600mhz. These voltages are Prime tested and stable!
Bluetooth mod
This being an older machine, it comes with 802.11b and no Bluetooth. While 11b is enough for me, I needed Bluetooth for some things I wanted to do so I added an onboard external Bluetooth dongle. There is a spot on the motherboard to connect an internal adapter similar to this mod for the TR VAIO but I decided to use a USB adapter as it was cheaper, better range, newer spec 2.0 and driver compatibility would be better. I ended up getting a Zoom Class 1 100M 2.0 USB adapter. I slapped that bad boy on the top of the lid with some double sided tape and soldered a cable into the internal USB port to hook it up. Works wonderfully!
Hard drive Mod
The original 1.8" 30GB (also used in the IPOD) drive was SLOW and besides my XP install died and I was thinking the drive might be failing so it was time for an upgade. Flash SSD are very cool, so I wanted one but did not want to pay the high prices for a production drive so I decided to build my own. First I searched for a CF-mini ATA adapter but none are currently produced so I had to do it myself. I found a dead IPOD drive and scavanged the connector off of it then soldered it to a CF-2.5" ide adapter I had laying around. The 1.8" ide has the same pinout as a standard IDE drive except it is flipped around. The result was a rather ugly but usuable adapter that was the same footprint of the original drive. I populated it with an 8GB Lexar 300x UDMA CF card. This card is FAST, 45mb/s read 35mb/s write much better than the original and improved battery life quite a bit. One of the many problems I ran into was that the BIOS and IDE controller would not run the drive in DMA-5 or ATA/100 that it was capable of, reducing it to DMA-2 or ATA/33. I think this is because it did not recognize an 80 conductor cable but that is just a speculation as I am still not sure exactly why. Whatever the reason I was able to get it to run at DMA-5 by editing the register values in the Intel 82801DBM IDE controller according to the datasheet at startup with WCPSET. Now it runs at full tilt, ATA/100. Boot times are rediculously fast!
One other minor issue was the CF-removable IDE bit. Many manufacturers (so far I have seen Sandisk and Lexar) set a bit in the cards firmware that tells the controller they are a Removable drive vs a Fixed disk. XP has issues with multiple partitions on removable disks as well as running the OS itself. XP will install fine but certain programs will not install correctly and Virtual Memory, System Restore and Hibernation/ACPI will not work. To resolve this you must change the normal driver to a Hitachi Microdrive driver that identifies the disk as a Fixed Disk and not Removable. Sandisk has a utility under NDA that allows you to change the bit on their cards but it will not work with other manufacturers. Also don't know if it will work with the new Extreme IV UDMA cards as no one has tested it.
Please note, if you want to try to build this adapter yourself, my advise is DON'T unless you enjoy pain. The connectors are SMALL and very hard to solder to. Plus they tend to come off with little force and need to be resoldered. Also note the above issue with faster UDMA cards and the removable bit.
If you want such an adapter I am looking at having a manufacturing company in Taiwan or Hong Kong produce on. I will keep this page updated.
What is the net result of all this nonsense? I very fast usable mini computer I think that is better than any of the other current offerings by various manufaturers out there including OQO, the Sony UX series (this is actually the predecessor to the U and UX series) the Flipstart, the Raon Vega, Gigabyte, Samsung Q1 etc. See the Benchmark I ran on my machine compared to this link and this link for the OQO 1.5Ghz Via processor. This machine also has a 1024x768 full XGA screen unlike some of the others above, a PCMCIA slot and a more usable keyboard. It also has a discreet graphics card and while it is only a Radeon 7000 level card it still beats out any onboard graphics processor from any mnufacturer in 3D apps. If you look at the benchmarks I am getting much higher scores and this from a machine that is almost over 4 years old. Battery life can also be extended to 12-16hrs with a xtra capacity battery. You can usually find used U101's on ebay for anywhere from $600-$900.
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