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Documenting obscure 90s laptop brands - WinBook

DeltaDon said:
They are Pentium Socket 5 laptops. AKA- 75MHz to 166 MHz without MMX Intel CPU based and no AMD's. I'll need to check on if any with TFT's are left. The real problem with selling the Green 753's is the cost of shipping, they are double boxed and so the weight is about 14 or more pounds (I think) as sealed. Plus they are not configured, lacking any CPU, any extra RAM (2 slots of 72 pin SODIMM EDO - has 8MB on mobo/for a total of 48MB max), no hard drive and there's no main battery or a source of main batteries. (AC adapter use only) In the box is the laptop, hard drive caddy, AC adapter, manuals, driver floppies for Win3/Win95 and a leatherette carry bag. The laptop has a 3.5" floppy and a CD-ROM drive built-in. No USB ports, but has serial, parallel and VGA plus 2 early PCMCIA NON-cardbus compatible slots so many PCMCIA cards don't work. Since they are in sealed boxes it is possible of a dud too. I do have most parts including motherboard, but no new LCD's if there's an issue. If I don't have to build and test (ship still sealed) then I'm happy to get $50 plus shipping.
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Let me check my CPU collection, believe I have a non MMX Winbook CPU in there. I am very interested, any chance you can just pull a few out to see if they post?
 
Did you see any hinge plastic issues with these back in the day? I’d possibly consider one this summer after the VCF swap meet is passed but I haven’t bought anything off a forum before so I’d have to work through some stuff for that. Privacy and such.
 
NiMh main battery slides in behind a hinged side opening and haven't been available from any of the online battery suppliers for some years. The CMOS battery is internal and is a rechargeable NiMH. AFAIK, some Green 753's and the newer Green 753+ laptops were the first laptops that ever used a heatpipe for CPU cooling in lieu of a fan. Some came with fans and others with the heatpipe.
 
DeltaDon said:
The CMOS battery is internal and is a rechargeable NiMH.
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Uh oh. Not sure if you know, but those NiMH rechargeable VARTA batteries always leak. That would be my main concern, would probably be a good idea to check those before they get sent. Many will still be fine I'm sure but others are probably corroded.

Edit: Also, WinBook XL reference has just been added to the site: https://macdat.net/pc/winbook/xl_home.html
 
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3lectr1c said:
Did you see any hinge plastic issues with these back in the day? I’d possibly consider one this summer after the VCF swap meet is passed but I haven’t bought anything off a forum before so I’d have to work through some stuff for that. Privacy and such.
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As with any plastic case laptops there's broken hinges. The case on these laptops is fairly well designed except the hinge covers need RTV to hold in place if the small retaining tabs break. I have been thinking of taking a few of them to the VCF East swap meets and seeing if there's any interest. As I said shipping has become a PITA for anything over a pound or two. Even worse for a long package where the post office has an extra fee for things like shipping a fly fishing rod.
 
If you bring one of those to the June swap meet then I’ll very likely be there and would probably buy one, assuming you could make sure the NiMH CMOS battery hasn’t toasted it.
 
3lectr1c said:
erg!!! Just saw this. Meant Compal, phone autocorrected and I didn’t notice. Could any moderator correct that? Most probably won’t read to the second page and I don’t anyone getting the wrong idea from reading this thread. Thanks!
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Fixed now! Thanks VeryVon.
 
I tried to see the stored Twinhead website on the Wayback Machine, but couldn't get the site to open any of them. So I did a quick search and found several Twinhead P85 photos online. Looks just like the Winbook XL, IMHO. I don't own the rights and so am not attaching any of them.
 
Can you link the pages you found them on? Couldn't find any when I looked. Just checked again and the same.
 
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Oh, drat. I took a second look and it was photos of the Twinhead P79 that I found. Do a search for that one and check it out. I believe you can see the appearance is nearly the same as the P85.
 
It certainly does look rather similar. The XL doesn't have the secondary LCD though.
 
I bought another WinBook for my collection. At this point I think I should just commit to starting a WinBook collection, I mean, I've quite come to like the obsolete brand. Just think they're cool.

Anyways, the one I've just gotten is a WinBook X4 - circa early 2003. Likely one of the last P4M based notebooks introduced. Was kind of panned in reviews for not having a Pentium M built in by that point. Ah well. I think it's nice enough system. I'll be writing about it more in the future. Currently waiting on one of those stupid proprietary hard drive adapters to come in from eBay before I can run anything other than USB-booted linux on it. Seems to work ok for what I've tested, and it was pretty cheap.
 
Crazy how much laptops progressed in just 10 years back then! Things certainly have plateaued out a lot since then haven’t they.
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A followup on this thread. The X4 was an Alphatop Green 550 (later on ECS took them over) and there were other versions from G550 to Green 554 that were just updates for faster motherboards. There was also a later machine with the same case that used one of the off base low power CPU's. (Transsend????) I've got to see if I can find out more info on that one.
 
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