The old iOpener [iopenerbbs, iopenerupdate] that we have on the kitchen counter was starting to act really flaky recently. I more or less decided that I was going to trash it in favor of a more modern computer, but I figured I'd see if there was any way I could bring it back to life on the cheap first. Sure enough, I was able to do it.
After I originally hacked the thing back in 2000, I never bothered to keep track of later developments in the iOpener hacker community. It turns out that they made a few great discoveries and optimizations, and thanks to the perseverance of the old I-Appliance BBS, those hacks are still documented.
Here's what I did to bring my iOpener back up to snuff:
Win98 is still an excellent desktop OS for old computers, especially because you can run Internet Explorer in "kiosk mode" by pressing F11. I optimized Win98 by changing the swap file from being "managed by Windows" to being a fixed 2GB.
I bought a 40GB Samsung Spinpoint MP0402H from Newegg for about $60. It is extremely quiet, and is an order of magnitude faster than the old 1GB IBM drive was using before. I used the excellent utility Image for Windows to copy the contents of the old drive to the new one using a USB IDE Cable on my WinXP machine.
The original hacking crew had a tough time finding RAM that would work in the iOpener, so I guess I got lucky. A 128MB PC133 144-Pin Laptop SODIMM (16X64NB133-N) from CompGeeks for $17 works just fine, and much better than the original 32MB.
I updated the BIOS to match the new drive and RAM. In particular, I set the IDE mode to PIO Mode 4, and set the DRAM Timings from SDRAM 10ns to Turbo.
Thanks to posts from Georgie, I increased the hard drive performance by 3X and fixed an extremely nasty USB bug that was crippling my WiFi performance. The details are here and here, but in summary, I downloaded the PCI utility from John Fine's site, stuck it in the PATH, and added these lines to autoexec.bat:
rem fix USB
c:\util\pci r75=a3 r40,7,2=2
rem fix PCI IDE
c:\util\pci r43,7,1=1a r44,7,1=8 r4c,7,1=3f r53,7,1=1 r4b,7,1=10
I update the core chipset drivers to the "Retro" version 4.35 from here. It improved the hard drive performance as well as fixed the LCD backlight when the screen is turned off.
Along with a new cheapo compact keyboard and a trackball mouse, we've got a nicely usable counter-top web terminal again. Uhh, what do we use it for? To look up recipes for cocktails, of course!
