So weve got a couple of these older (2008), but still very useful, semi-rugged Motion Computing le1700 12 tablets PCs, that are specifically designed for field data collection. Theyre actually neat little boxes. Theyve got a magnesium chassis with a splash resistant screen thats readable in bright sunlight (and the screen is actually a wacom tablet, with stylus), actual network and serial ports, vga and dvi, and three different wireless chipsets (an Intel and an atheros WiFi for ABG with diversity... Very useful for wifi security audits... and a wimax we dont care about). Most newer computers, and almost all newer tablets, lack these I/O options. That makes the le1700 very useful for test and repair work, and data collection, even though theyre 6 years old. Were prepping them to use on the new client site to do wireless site mapping and audit, which means wiping and reloading them. As currently configured, theyre 1.5ghz core 2 duos, with 2gigs, running win 7 pro, with 80gb 1.8 4200rpm hard drives... The same drives as in the original iPod actually. If youve ever tried to run win 7 with only 2gig of ram and a slow hard drive... You know just how painful that is. I was strongly reminded just how painful it can get, during the critical windows update process. The first round, was 129 critical updates, which took appx 2hrs to download and install... Then reboot and update again for the second round... 181 critical and 32 optional, which took 4hrs to download and install. Then reboot for round 3 and another 41. Theyre running now, while I try to get to sleep. Ive also started the wipe and restore on another one of them to run overnight. Theres nothing I can do about the crap hard drive... Id love to put a compact pcie or msata SSD in there (we have spares around)... Unfortunately, its ATA, and theres apparently no sata on the board (though the chipset supports it). What I can do though, is up the RAM. It takes standard DDR2 sodimms, and I know weve got a box full of those. In theory it can only take 4gig, but its an IA64 chip set and an IA64 cpu, so with the final BIOS update from 2010, I may be able to squeeze 8 gig in... And hell, The difference between 2gig and 4gig is still MORE than worth it. Plus, when I actually crack the box open, it wouldnt surprise me to find there actually is a SATA header on the board somewhere that I can access... Or that there is a compact/mobile pciexpress slot (the spec sheet says something that MAY mean there is... Im not sure). I think the wimax card uses mpcie, and I can get an SSD thatll fit in the same space. Hell even one of the mpcie sdcard or cf card reader adapters they use for arduinos or raspberry pis would be faster than the HDD in there now. It does have a pciexpress card slot as well, and there are setups to stick an SD, cf, or sad in those, but Im not sure if they can be the boot drive. Also, once I get 4gb or hopefully 8gb in there, I can go ahead and upgrade to a 64bit image, which will make a difference as far as memory management and efficiency. So... You may be thinking... With such low resources why bother with win 7 pro? Why not just reimage with Linux? Two reasons... One for testing purposes, we want to use at least some windows machines, because thats what the majority if the clients machines are... That said, Im going to try to put Kali on one of them after I upgrade the ram... Or if I cant get that working, forum searches are telling me that mint, and a couple of lighter weight distros are easy to get working. More importantly at the moment though... There are several firmware updates needed on the machiens, which can only be applied from a patched and updated win 7 install (I tried using the updater from an unpatched install... No go). So, slow and painful it is....
Posted on: Wed, 17 Dec 2014 06:32:47 +0000