HP OmniBook 300 find!

[Dave Britten]

Some more rambling on the OB300:

The one I got was actually a UK model, judging from the keyboard layout. I was able to change a few ini files to go back to a US English layout, which works fine, apart from a few of the key labels being wrong (particularly @, #, and quotes). No big deal for a touch-typist.

Never could get OBMax to work with this unit for some reason.

I think the ROM card for the UK model includes the updated compact flash drivers from the 1.1 ROM. I got ahold of a 1.1 ROM image for US model, and wrote it to a linear flash card (a much more complicated task than just dumping an image to a device with dd; I think I had to use some DOS-based Intel flash utility on my Libretto or something like that), but didn't see any increase in card compatibility running that ROM.

I'd like to get ahold of a ROM image for an OB430 and see what I can do with that. Should end up with a lot more conventional memory free not having all the MS Flash and Doublespace drivers loaded, but RAM would be a lot tighter overall since Windows would be running from the C: drive, rather than in-place from the ROM card. On the other hand, being able to run in 386-enhanced mode would afford you the use of virtual memory.