HP OmniBook 300 find!

[Bill (Smithville NJ)]

Adam,

Congratulations on getting the OB-300. I have been a fan of the whole series of Omnibooks. I have all three versions that run on penlight batteries - 300, 425, 430.

You will definitely want to swap out the old 40 MB hard drive. I have a stack of them that have all gone bad. You will want to install a flash card - will be faster and save on battery power. I've used several sandisk and pny CF cards in mine.

If you don't want to rebuild the rechargeable battery pack, then I would recommend using Everyready lithium AA batteries. These will give a lot longer life than regular AA batteries. The only downside is that there may not be much warning before they die.

I do not use windows on mine - I just stick to standard MSDOS, since I love playing in standard DOS. Unfortunately, the OB-300 doesn't have as much free space available. But fortunately, there is an utility called OBMAX that will recover some of the DOS work space. I could send you OBMAX if you need it.

I would recommend switching to a flash card. Just pop out that old hard drive and put the flash card in. Reset the OB and it should automatically try to set the card up and copy the files to it. You may want to disable the double space installation, since you don't need it with a larger CF card. I believe that you answer No at some point - I know I was able to do it - but am now a little fuzzy on how to do it.

The best OB in the series is the OB-430. It will still use the AA batteries and will let you install other operating systems (if you have the memory). Plus, you can use a 512 MB flash card as the C-Drive. Actually, you can use 4 GB CF cards (including microdrives). It will only format the first 512MB.

My OB-430 has 8MB memory and a 512mb compact flash card for the hard drive. I have almost all my old MSDOS programs on it and still have lots of room on the drive. I have installed the following operating systems on flash cards on the OB-430: MSDOS 6.22, XENIX 2.3.4, Slackware Linux 7.1, and CP/M-86. I tried OS/2 but could never get it installed. The Slackware Linux 7.1 is installed on a 4GB micro drive - first partition is 512MB with MSDOS 6.2 and the remainder (3.5GB) has Linux installed.


Here's a forum thread about some programs that run on the OB-300:

OB-300 Thread

Following is Blog on Disabling Double Space:

OB-300 Blog

Note: He mentions the ROM card (slot D). There are several ROM cards and later ones allow for CF cards.

You most likely will not be able to find an expansion memory card. You're best bet is to keep your eyes out for another OB (preferably the 430) that has a card already in it. A few years ago I picked up an OB-430 for on ebay that had a cracked screen - but it had a 6mb memory card in it that I was able to transfer to my working 430. I got it cheap due to the cracked screen.

Enjoy your new toy - they are a lot of fun.

Please let me know if you want a copy of the OBMAX program.

Bill
Smithville, NJ