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I'm too lazy to edit this down. Hope Ken doesn't mind. He's answered some questions, and brought up a few new questions. Oh well. :) Oh, and I've already forwarded this to the software.watson.ibm.com ftp site administrator. It looks like this stuff *will* be available via ftp, it's just a question of when. Send any other questions to me and I'll queue them up and forward them. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Ken Inoue <xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Tue, 26 Apr 94 13:09:53 JST To: John Kim <jokim@jarthur.cs.hmc.edu> Subject: Who at IBM is in charge of TP750 stuff? John, My apologies for the delay in responding to you. I have been waiting for news on the IBM Internet FTP site. To cut a long story short, we (ThinkPad development) can authorize the FTP site coordinator to make the drivers package available to public, *IF* she/he agrees. The Watson FTP site coordinator hasn't returned our calls... if you know her/his Internet ID you may want to try alerting the coordinator to the situation. Now to answer your questions as best I can: >1. Somebody who asked IBM tech support about installing a larger hard drive >was told that the BIOS won't support a hard drive larger than 340 MB. Is >this true? And if it isn't, how do you configure the BIOS to recognize, >say, a 500 MB hard drive with x cylinders, y sectors, etc? The tech support is correct in that the BIOS has not been tested with anything larger than the 340MB drive that we offer. Also, as you know, there is a magic number (528 million bytes) imposed by current IDE drive interface spec. To go beyond that magic number would require changes to BIOS. As for drives between 340M and 528M, anything goes; the drive may work if the drive supports the IDE identity command that returns drive parameters such as cyls/sectors/heads. Please note however that your warranty will be void if your 750 fails (e.g. fuse blowout due to too much peak power drain) as a result of using an unsupported drive. >2. Is there any way to increase the tracking speed of the Trackpoint II >under OS/2? The OS/2 mouse control is already at maximum sensitivity and >it's still too slow. Sorry but this is an OS/2 issue; as you know, the OS/2 development is in Boca Raton, FL - on the wrong side of the Pacific pond :) Your best bet might be to patch the OS/2 mouse driver. I understand the source code CD-ROM is availble from IBM. You may want to call OS/2 tech support or try OS/2 support forums on CompuServe. >3. Where's a better source of TP750 technical info? The technical manuals >are terrible. Perhaps the technical reference manuals for individual chipsets (e.g. Intel 486SL, Western Digital WD90C24) might be better at describing the in-depth details that interest you. However, please note that programs written directly to the hardware registers will not be guaranteed to work in future models of ThinkPads. >4. Is there a way to turn the backlight off without turning off the LCD? >When I'm typing in the sunlight, I can see the screen just fine and I'd like >to save some power by turning off the backlight. I am afraid turning off the backlight would make the screen unreadable, the ambient light notwithstanding. The screen has to be of a type called 'transflective' to begin with, to make it feasible; it takes something like a half mirror which passes through backlight but at the same time reflects the incoming light to some degree. None of the 750 line features a transflective panel. (In case you are wondering why: just as a half mirror can't do as good a job of reflecting light as a normal mirror or of passing light as a transparent window, transflective mono LCDs are generally not quite as bright as normal backlit LCDs of comparable power consumption, because the reflecting part absorbs the backlight. To the best of my knowledge no manufacturer produces a transflective color LCD, because the color filters absorb so much light (approx. 2/3 - e.g. the Red filter blocks Green and Blue) that any reflected light, reduced to about 1/9 of the original intensity after passing through the filters twice, just isn't enough to make the screen readable.) >5. What's different about the floppy drive? What gap values, etc, are used >for 2.88 Mb drives, and why does the drive change line act differently? The diskette drive controller is configured to be compatible with PS/2 Model 30, the first AT bus PS/2. > 6. How do I read the battery capacity from a program? One way to do this in DOS is to use APM BIOS. The APM specification version 1.1 (by Intel et al.) is on CompuServe PLUGPLAY forum; the 750 supports version 1.0 but if I remember correctly the battery status interface should be the same between 1.0 and 1.1. Please be careful about some of the APM BIOS calls that control system power state, as improper use of these calls can result in system crash (the APM BIOS calls were not meant to be used by two power managers). I am afraid that currently there is no easy way to do this in OS/2 without interfering with the operation of the standard power manager. Hope this answers your questions. Sincerely, Ken Inoue -- John H. Kim | "Just try telling the IRS you don't feel like jokim@jarthur.cs.hmc.edu | 'contributing' this year come April" - Bob Dole This mail sent by NUPop | on Bill Clinton's avoidance of the word "taxes"