I don't think it's time really, but rather the fact that you can get this thrown at you for free now, because it's trash. People love free stuff, even if it's free junk.
That's a funny theory. It kind of reminds me of that one time Sony shipped a Basic interpreter disk with their PS2s in Europe in an attempt to avoid tariffs on game consoles that existed there at the time
@OptiplexAircraft X doesn't mean anything in this situation. Just a placeholder basically. "Installing Windows 7 on the terrible windows CE laptop..." "Installing Ubuntu on the terrible windows CE laptop..." Etc. Etc
ye so those price checking guns are essentially purpose built Windows Mobile PDA devices (like the PocketPC PDAs from the 2000s). Really just an easy way to deploy many single purpose devices with a really locked down OS that cant be changed easily or at all (if its built into a eeprom or firmware chip) you can load linux though from an external boot device (only tried this on a Neoware thin client WCE device to not much success but it apparently can run Tinycore)
Yeah there was a community of GPS modders I stumbled across about a decade ago, there was a ton of apps and mortscripts for these devices, I didn't delve much past loading Doom, TCPMP(Tiny core pocket media player) and WinCEBoy
Here in Mexico we have a supermarket chain that used to have price checkers made by NCR that were running Windows 2000, even the cash registers of the nearest store to me were running Windows 2000, then they changed their OS to XP, then to 7 and now they use Windows 10, it was quite interesting that they keep using a really old Windows version in their systems.
I also have seen price checkers mainly of the Zebra brand that now run Android. They are basically an Android device, like your phone but without phone capabilities.
There also are a few sewing maschines (the fancy ones with embroider units) from Bernina sold in the mid 2000s that featured Windows CE and a touchscreen interface.
the click to zoom feature is I think the smartest part. Old people are gonna buy this cause they don't know what from what and now they can actually see what they are typing. Its great . Thanks for the vids
12:30 - if i remember correctly you could actually stream TH-cam videos from any regular media player. I actually did this on my Nokia E66 with RealPlayer. That TH-cam app is probably just used some old API to search videos and stream them with WMP.
apparently TH-cam still serve plain old h264 mp4 stream if asked so unless you time travel too close to Jesus' birth there's fair chance the device could technically play it
@@rigen97 Only works if it's in supported browser. Yes it supports very old h264 codec but the old basic early youtube HTML has long been deprecated, so why it only shows "your browser is no longer supported" and can't go any further. Even if he could install a supported browser to that laptop, it still only has very slim chance to get youtube working as intended as the CPU itself is too weak, even weaker than Intel Atom
There's a whole pack of different firmwares, including WinCE, Debian & Android, for this thing on the Internet Archive named "Windows CE Netbook Firmware Collection", uploaded by RaduTek.
9:37 I'm almost certain this is because the UI was optimized for smartphones where it would open an on-screen keyboard when you focus a textbox and it would make sense to make it that big because there's not much room left on screen.
...which is an old OLD meme song (around 2010 IIRC). The manifacturer is probably just some random factory in Shenzhen and decided to put some random meme song and picture to test their device (the display / speaker / program is functioning etc), and don't bother to remove because no one really cared.
Yea we used to own some of them too and they were very decent for what they were. But that was in the final days of tube tvs since it was like 1998-2005 when we got it. Heavy af but I liked them 🤣
Not sure about the 90s ones, but the late-tube era Sylvania sets (2001/2 and later) were brand slap-on jobs, and were manufactured by Funai - who also produced identical models under the Magnavox and Emerson brand.
I think all of the warnings and disclaimers are more to do with the licencing around windows embedded, spesifically embedded is a slimmed down version of windows, mainly intended to run on hardware that is intended for only one spesific application. like a kiosk, digital signage, or a machine controller. all of the disclaimer jargon, to me, screams 'we are using windows embedded exclusively in the way as exactly worded in the licencing agreement'
Windows CE actually has very little overlap with Windows at all, since it doesn't use Windows NT. But yea, your theory is probably correct. CE in these late stages was mainly meant for full-screen applications, like in-car entertainment systems or kiosks. The bonkers UI was fine as long as it could run the vendor's in-house GUI and set it to fullscreen mode, as well as support the dying line of Windows mobile devices before Microsoft could come up with something better. The final major release of Windows CE in 2013 actually dropped most of the GUI. All that was left was something reminiscent of the Weston desktop on linux, which was originally intended to demonstrate that Linux could work for... in-car entertainment systems and kiosks.
@@solenoids3 At least MS committing to a weird idea that everyone is going to love getting slapped in face and then proceeding to hand everything to Android was hilarious
Windows Embedded and Windows Embedded *Compact* are two VERY different things. Compact has hardly anything at all shared with x86 Windows. Windows Embedded however (which long predates this version of CE) is a stripped down Windows, as you say. But that's not this. As usual, terrible naming from Microsoft. Must have been the same guy that named the Xbox line....
16:56 I went on the website listed in that about window, and surprisingly that "nPOP" mail viewer was last updated in 2023, it's up to version 1.2.6, and it's an open source freeware program !
I love how that laptop looks and the whole.. Everything about it. Seeing it just makes me wanna pack it up and bring it on a long trip, then at night curl up in bed and watch youtube on it all night. I get this weird feeling that someone who actually owns this and USED it alot would definitely have had long nights of watching content and loads of nostolgia for it, it just eminates charm and that feeling of 'this is a crappy laptop that you WILL grow to love, you WILL watch youtube on all night and you WILL eventually get a better version of.' Is that really weird or is that a shared opinion?
The thing about warranty void if loaded with other OS. Unofficially most computer retailers in Ukraine require you to bring back the laptop to a state you bought it. My friend almost got return rejected because of Windows installed on a FreeDOS device. Because it was exhibition unit, he talked them out to return as is.
Why would you NOT have a return that requires it to be in the same state? I buy buy a bag of oranges and try to return it after swapping them to apples I would expect to be rejected. Now, if you meant warranty repair, that's different.
You should try the Portuguese educational laptop Magalhães, the terrible laptop the Portuguese government gave to a lot of childs (me included) that bankrupted this small country. It has dual boot between win xp and a portuguese linux distro, Caixa mágica
Nothing beats the Brazilian positivo mobo s7, it had a genormous dual bezel, comic sans keyboard, a weird ass linux distro running on an SD card (which breaks if you try to run and update it nowadays)... Beautiful thing!
Was the computer given for free, or were they a part of your school intuition that you have to pay alongside? Your comment gave me so many childhood memories using Windows XP based computers because it was the only computer my family could afford. But now i got myself a gaming pc by the time i was old able to get a job.
@@mr-qt5oc most children got it for free, but for some reason i remember my mother had to pay 25€ for that. I remember that each school had laptop's that a child could "rent" for free, but this one was given. On the end, it became probably the biggest e-waste generator here (even though i still have mine)
Back in the day, what these were useful for is dumping footage off digital cameras on the go. Back when compact flash was expensive and you didn't have a bunch of spare storage options, you could use a cheap machine like that to offload files onto something larger, like an external USB drive. All you really needed was something that could work with USB ports.
14:19 Macross jumpscare - The image before at 14:16 looks extremely familiar, I think it was a really commonly shared piece of fanart. Will see if I can find a source.
So did you ever find the source? I bet the artist would get a kick out of hearing that their work somehow ended up on a random cheap Chinese not-a-computer.
Interesting, 11:20 the song name is in Chinese, reading "哥只是个传说" (I'm just a legend) sang by 陈旭 (Chen Xu). What kind of "smartbook" is this preloaded with a Chinese pop song?
I legit flinched when MJD Michael started talking about "carefully cracking" the package, mostly because the Dankest owner of Pods may have a habit of erm... Chaotically slaughtering those things with the Toledo's after saying something along those lines.. xD
It's a shovelware computer. Just slap a bunch of things together including stuff found on the internet to replace the stuff they didn't want to pay M$ for and sell it as is Cha-ching! More disposable junk to fill the landfills with. :-/
This feels an awful low like a situation where some marketing person saw these "Definitely not computers" in a Chinese manufacturing catalog and thought, "Oh, we can _totally_ undercut brands like Dell and HP and _corner_ the low-end market! I'm so smart" then throws the project at an engineer who actually understands the PC market and who knows this is thing is a joke and slapped together a disk image for this thing in an afternoon just to shut the other guy up.
Looks like the OEM got the absolute cheapest windows mobile license SKU then scraped the internet to find 3rd party replacements for apps that are in the more expensive Windows Mobile version. I’ve seen this edition on embedded industrial devices
I would love an entire episode of that "CE software collection" in a WinCE device, and trying other OSes on this one. If you are not allowed to entirely install other OS, if possible, you could try running them from the USB (Linux options at least). I think a version of Puppy Linux could work?
I love puppy Linux but I'm not sure modern pup would run well on this hardware.... I'm not sure anything modern would run very well. I'm thinking of trying to load Debian or Gentoo or something on the one I have
The Amazon redirect probably originally went to an affiliate link, so they get a very small cut of anything you purchased when you accessed it through that desktop shortcut. And I'm guessing they used the redirect so they could change the link if necessary.
the idea of a TH-cam app that uses an API to fetch site data is kind of cool and interesting. Nowadays that's really silly since we just do like, everything in browser or with a first party application, but for the target demo of a system like this, it's kind of a cool way to centralize sites like youtube to an app you just click on the desktop.
The jankiness of Windows CE / Embedded Compact 7 surprises me again and again. Yeah these cheap Sylvania devices are trash now and were trash back then but it's the awful OS that blows my mind. It always reminds me of some kind of old bootleg Windows linux distro or a Windows-style theme pack for phones in the early 2000s.
If I'm not mistaken, the keyboard in this thing comes from the cheapest tablet keyboards. I once had a "case" with such a keyboard. It was connected to a very thin micro USB. The "Zzz" function key worked like power button (I could force it to turn off just like real button). Btw it brakes two month after purchase.
Great video! I really like your channel, especially for the retrospectives. That browser reminds me of when I used IE 3 and Netscape in the 1990s! I also remember seeing these devices around the time the iPad came out. I never saw anyone by them.
Haha, that zooming-in on text boxes and making drop-down menus fill the screen is exactly the same behaviour as CE had on tiny PDAs... I remember plumbers and the gas man using these. It's quite useful on a tiny touchscreen with a stylus! On a laptop... not so much.
I have a similar netbook, brand name Jay-Tech. It's based on VIA's WM8505 SoC and it was my first Arm-based computer ever, even before the Raspberry Pi became available. I actually used it a lot as a pocket-sized Typewriter (smaller that Asus' first eeePC) and as mp3 player. There's a Debian hack for these WM8505-based machines that is maintained to this day. The WM8505 is a 300MHz Arm 5 SoC, so don't expect a gaming machine or a media center. But it ran the LXDE desktop and Abiword, so I was quite happy with it. Also, in 2010, lightweight browsers like Dillo were still quite usable. Oh, and Doom runs pretty well on this little gem on Linux.
That airbubbly screen film is a pixel perfect actual screenshot of the desktop you're booting into, with a slight shift in the panel from the bottom right so you have something to grab onto, and for some reason I find it amusing
You can identify piss poor electronics by noticing they are in that cheap ass plastic packaging rather than a proper box. Some exceptions do exist, like calculators but if you see a laptop, phone, etc in that kind of packaging and especially in a store not centered around tech it's probably gonna be shit. The sad thing is that it has more USB ports on it than my laptop that cost me almost $1000 when it was new.
do you need more usb port tho? the fact is even if it has soo many usb port it's still shitty at most i see this use as second computer or maybe even storage device for someone whole ass document
27:53 the issues with color and the messed up title screen aren't the PC's problem, it's just a glitch in the source port you're using. Specifically with the video resolution and bit depth settings in the video settings with Doom Legacy (Which is the source port you're using)
They were both large old-school brands. Sylvania made tubes, light bulbs, and consumer electronics while GE made those as well as everything else electrical.
The Jawbreaker / Bubble Breaker game came with Windows Mobile phones. Judging by the glitchy about screen, it's just running the Windows Mobile executable. My WM6 phone could start some apps designed for CE, but without a touchscreen they couldn't do much.
That Jawbreaker game was on my old Compaq C series Windows CE handheld (I can't remember which model it was but it was the high end colour version a couple of years before HP bought them out and created the Jornada series starting with the C series style). The game back then was called Bubble Pop not Jawbreaker. I used have a friend in Texas (I used to chat with him via ICQ as I am from the UK) who was from a rich family, he bought the same handheld as me and we used to have competitions to find the largest bubble chain in the infinite mode of the game. Even his dad got involved in the competition lol EDIT: Correction, it was called Bubble Breaker not Bubble Pop (hey I had not used the machine since 2000!) and the actual name can be seen in the video on the taskbar while the game is running.
@@ShadowGD_OfficialYT I would hardly say it's a geometry dash reference when the machine he is showing came out around 7 years before the game. Though I just noticed something... In the Start menu the game is called Jawbreaker, shown at 19:30 in the video, and Michael calls it that but while it's playing the Taskbar shows it as Bubble Breaker, which is actually the name of the old game, not Bubble Pop like I wrote. In my defence I was going from memory as the Compaq C series was late 1990's, I think I got my high end full colour model in 1998.The last time I used it was mid to late 2000.
On my little CE PDA it was just called "O" (a picture of one of the balls). It was what I played when I didn't have time to play that awesome CE port of Age of Empires (for the time and hardware), but still had some time to kill.
Probably just some chinese factory worker / test team put it there for a reason or another. Maybe they even used some kind of disk image that had it added from the initial testing, and it's included in all of them. The meme song in media player recent items, would support that theory. I doubt they'll test every unit with a random meme song blasting at the factory. Although I have to say, when I was young and innocent, and was working for a building automation company that delivered PC hardware to their customers, I frequently used to borrow the computers (mostly laptops) for the weekends and test drive them at home. I watched anime on them and listened to music, had some gaming done etc. Never had access to such nice hardware on my own. And as carefree I was, didn't usually had the smarts to clear recently opened files. Sometimes even copied some "legally obtained" anime flicks to the hard drive, and left it there. Or left some games installed. The machines were available for my personal needs maybe couple of weeks(ends), so I must've gone through nearly 100 different computer doing that. And after 10+ years of working for the same company, there were many occasions to collect the old hardware from the customers when they renewed their PC. And when checking things out on the hard drive (so I don't delete anything important) before recycling the machine, I many times saw traces of my old questionable ecchi animes and some J-pop/Anime tunes I had listened to on that machine.
9:27 The mobile version of firefox does that and it's really annoying. I never understood why browser developers feel the need to change the zoom of the browser when clicking on things.
I like how this laptop was packaged.
Yeah it's packaged nicely
Also the funniest thing that makes the laptop like a toy for kids
Its made from china
Packaged like an idiot!
that's not a laptop, its a mud made computer
So I guess 13 years is how long it takes something to go from cheap new junk to nostalgic retro junk.
same age as me 😭
I mean it was already retro junk to begin with 🤣
I don't think it's time really, but rather the fact that you can get this thrown at you for free now, because it's trash.
People love free stuff, even if it's free junk.
@@Michael-Archonaeus exactly lol. Plus there's something charming about retro cheapo stuff.
@@BaTTx😂
Fun Fact: The Sega Dreamcast has an image printed on the side of the console saying “Compatible with Windows CE”
im pretty sure mjd has the web browser that runs on windows ce iirc
@@JasperFoxo Ye I do to but I couldn’t get the browser to work
You have the wrong colour on the Sega swirl. Just kidding I know it was only blue here in Europe.
Has anybody tried getting a full fledged windows or linux distro on an Dreamcast
@@wertywerrtyson5529 Ye I was always confused why they changed it for Europe
"This product is not a computer." I wonder if they were trying to avoid some specific tax with that, arguing that it is not technically a computer.
i wonder........
@@xiphoidPXCB i too wonder........
It's like the reverse of Sony arguing the PS2 was a computer to avoid taxes on game consoles
Probably trying to make sure no one who thought this was a computer and not manufactured e-waste could sue for false advertisement
That's a funny theory. It kind of reminds me of that one time Sony shipped a Basic interpreter disk with their PS2s in Europe in an attempt to avoid tariffs on game consoles that existed there at the time
An entire laptop in a blisterpack is wild.
The giant wall hanger slot is hilarious
I'm ready for "Installing X on the terrible windows CE laptop and everything goes wrong" 😂
Why would you want to install Twitter on that?
@@higihups Maybe they meant Mac OS X.
@@OptiplexAircraft or XUbuntu
@OptiplexAircraft X doesn't mean anything in this situation. Just a placeholder basically.
"Installing Windows 7 on the terrible windows CE laptop..."
"Installing Ubuntu on the terrible windows CE laptop..."
Etc. Etc
@@johang727 Aha, got it. But I tend to seem that Mac OS never tends to work. (Even if nothing actually does)
I had an old car GPS that used to run Windows CE.....i also still see Windows CE running on those price checking things at the supermarket
ye so those price checking guns are essentially purpose built Windows Mobile PDA devices (like the PocketPC PDAs from the 2000s). Really just an easy way to deploy many single purpose devices with a really locked down OS that cant be changed easily or at all (if its built into a eeprom or firmware chip) you can load linux though from an external boot device (only tried this on a Neoware thin client WCE device to not much success but it apparently can run Tinycore)
Yeah there was a community of GPS modders I stumbled across about a decade ago, there was a ton of apps and mortscripts for these devices, I didn't delve much past loading Doom, TCPMP(Tiny core pocket media player) and WinCEBoy
Here in Mexico we have a supermarket chain that used to have price checkers made by NCR that were running Windows 2000, even the cash registers of the nearest store to me were running Windows 2000, then they changed their OS to XP, then to 7 and now they use Windows 10, it was quite interesting that they keep using a really old Windows version in their systems.
I also have seen price checkers mainly of the Zebra brand that now run Android. They are basically an Android device, like your phone but without phone capabilities.
There also are a few sewing maschines (the fancy ones with embroider units) from Bernina sold in the mid 2000s that featured Windows CE and a touchscreen interface.
the click to zoom feature is I think the smartest part. Old people are gonna buy this cause they don't know what from what and now they can actually see what they are typing. Its great . Thanks for the vids
😅 31:48
Zoom feature probably is because most of this software was designed for a Pocket PC or Smartphone first.
27:45 can you change display settings to 256 colors? i've seen similar issues on win 9x with old software
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a computer in a “blister pack”
but it's "not a computer"
These things were sold st CVS.
The drugstore.
Let that sink in.
@@jeffread6593 fun fact in the 80s, in the UK the drugstore Boots the chemist had exclusive retail rights over the NES.
It’s NOT a computer! It’s a wireless internet device running windows compact edition 7
@@MaxOakland 🤓
12:30 - if i remember correctly you could actually stream TH-cam videos from any regular media player. I actually did this on my Nokia E66 with RealPlayer. That TH-cam app is probably just used some old API to search videos and stream them with WMP.
apparently TH-cam still serve plain old h264 mp4 stream if asked so unless you time travel too close to Jesus' birth there's fair chance the device could technically play it
I think you still can. Put a TH-cam video URL into VLC and it'll play it
@@Jesse78that doesnt work for me
@@rigen97 Only works if it's in supported browser. Yes it supports very old h264 codec but the old basic early youtube HTML has long been deprecated, so why it only shows "your browser is no longer supported" and can't go any further.
Even if he could install a supported browser to that laptop, it still only has very slim chance to get youtube working as intended as the CPU itself is too weak, even weaker than Intel Atom
@@Jesse78 I think that used to be possible, you could even download videos with VLC that way.
I definitely want to see a video on the installation of other OS's on this thing!
Me too
There's a whole pack of different firmwares, including WinCE, Debian & Android, for this thing on the Internet Archive named "Windows CE Netbook Firmware Collection", uploaded by RaduTek.
Yes, I wanna see how it will perform with Linux.
If it will run windows XP, it can run everything
Same windows 95 may work well
Incredible how this tiny shity laptop has more ports that the newest high top devices.
We simply don't need many ports now. Things that needed different ports can now all be done through USB-C.
@@n646n the problem with usb-c for everything is that modern laptops don't have 6 of them.
@@magfal Just get a laptop you can swap the ports on, like framework.
@@magfali have a multi port pcie device. gpu is running in x8 but now i can connect 8 mouses to computar
@@Luis-lb9df I'm running 6 monitors of my eGPU when docked. but when mobile I'd like to have some flexibility too.
9:37 I'm almost certain this is because the UI was optimized for smartphones where it would open an on-screen keyboard when you focus a textbox and it would make sense to make it that big because there's not much room left on screen.
23:23 I think I really am onto something
The titile of Chinese song means ”Chen Xu, Your Bro (myself) is only a legend.mp3“
...which is an old OLD meme song (around 2010 IIRC). The manifacturer is probably just some random factory in Shenzhen and decided to put some random meme song and picture to test their device (the display / speaker / program is functioning etc), and don't bother to remove because no one really cared.
@@ElfinaAshfield Wven weirder, they likely removed the mp3 file but didn't clear the playlist
It’s so frustrating to see some completely foreign meme these times when everything is globalised. Makes me want to dive to Chinese memes though 💀
That’s cool!
@@gluttonousmaximus9048 Probably the media player just kept what's been played last time.
Ok, there's something so weird and alternate reality feeling about seeing a full laptop being packaged in a blister pack.
fun fact: back in the late 90s sylvania made some televisions and vcrs, however weren’t very popular. i own one of those tvs and vcrs.
They also made CD players, because I have one of them from a while back.
Yea we used to own some of them too and they were very decent for what they were. But that was in the final days of tube tvs since it was like 1998-2005 when we got it. Heavy af but I liked them 🤣
Not sure about the 90s ones, but the late-tube era Sylvania sets (2001/2 and later) were brand slap-on jobs, and were manufactured by Funai - who also produced identical models under the Magnavox and Emerson brand.
@@ilnyaqualan emerson also did the same, they just slapped their logo on funai vcr/dvd combos
Sylvania made electronics all throughout its history. It became GTE and is now Verizon.
If you leave one of these running Solitaire for long enough (months), it somehow runs out of RAM and becomes completely unusable until it's rebooted.
The nature of Microsoft... Various issues that compound and worsen with time
Sounds like a memory leak
@@jaystep_ Yes this sounds like a memory leak basically by definition lol
That’s a memory leak if I’ve ever seen one
14:21 What an unexpected way to find Macross. Never thought I would see that here on this channel.
Most CE builds dont include stolen Anime art mixed with the default Microsoft Pictures.
michealsoft binbows
I enjoy the fact that almost every window seemingly has a different theme.
I had one from another brand and there was no consistency between apps
It's the Linux experience on Windows!
I think all of the warnings and disclaimers are more to do with the licencing around windows embedded, spesifically embedded is a slimmed down version of windows, mainly intended to run on hardware that is intended for only one spesific application. like a kiosk, digital signage, or a machine controller.
all of the disclaimer jargon, to me, screams 'we are using windows embedded exclusively in the way as exactly worded in the licencing agreement'
presumably even the use of the name 'smart book' is to seperate the device from being classified as being a proper computer.
It's crude way of saying "It's Windows! *but not actually" to avoid getting lawsuits
Windows CE actually has very little overlap with Windows at all, since it doesn't use Windows NT.
But yea, your theory is probably correct. CE in these late stages was mainly meant for full-screen applications, like in-car entertainment systems or kiosks. The bonkers UI was fine as long as it could run the vendor's in-house GUI and set it to fullscreen mode, as well as support the dying line of Windows mobile devices before Microsoft could come up with something better. The final major release of Windows CE in 2013 actually dropped most of the GUI. All that was left was something reminiscent of the Weston desktop on linux, which was originally intended to demonstrate that Linux could work for... in-car entertainment systems and kiosks.
@@solenoids3 At least MS committing to a weird idea that everyone is going to love getting slapped in face and then proceeding to hand everything to Android was hilarious
Windows Embedded and Windows Embedded *Compact* are two VERY different things. Compact has hardly anything at all shared with x86 Windows.
Windows Embedded however (which long predates this version of CE) is a stripped down Windows, as you say. But that's not this. As usual, terrible naming from Microsoft. Must have been the same guy that named the Xbox line....
Imagine trapping a laptop in the worst type of packaging: Clamshell
every laptop use the clamshell design ... it is not a laptop if it is not a clamshell
Clamshell in clamshell @@xgui4-studios
@@xgui4-studios I meant the packaging. The clamshell design is fine, the clamshell packaging is what makes me die inside.
Not just any clamshell, but blister packaged clamshell.
@@SockyNoob so annoying lmao
i prefer a box
"Not a computer" In the manual it says "setting up your computer" though... hmm... 🤔
"This isn't a computer, but if you had a computer and wanted to set it up, this is what you'd do..."
that doom gameplay felt like cruelty squad but on even more drugs
this is just like Gorbino's Quest of Life
Imagine pulling one of these out of your backpack at Defcon, running Gentoo.
Pulls it out from the plastic pack directly at the comvention
You’d be the belle of the ball
16:56 I went on the website listed in that about window, and surprisingly that "nPOP" mail viewer was last updated in 2023, it's up to version 1.2.6, and it's an open source freeware program !
I love how that laptop looks and the whole.. Everything about it.
Seeing it just makes me wanna pack it up and bring it on a long trip, then at night curl up in bed and watch youtube on it all night.
I get this weird feeling that someone who actually owns this and USED it alot would definitely have had long nights of watching content and loads of nostolgia for it, it just eminates charm and that feeling of 'this is a crappy laptop that you WILL grow to love, you WILL watch youtube on all night and you WILL eventually get a better version of.'
Is that really weird or is that a shared opinion?
The thing about warranty void if loaded with other OS. Unofficially most computer retailers in Ukraine require you to bring back the laptop to a state you bought it. My friend almost got return rejected because of Windows installed on a FreeDOS device. Because it was exhibition unit, he talked them out to return as is.
Why would you NOT have a return that requires it to be in the same state? I buy buy a bag of oranges and try to return it after swapping them to apples I would expect to be rejected.
Now, if you meant warranty repair, that's different.
What city exactly? It isn't the case in mine
@@techexplorer7484 Telemart/Rozetka, post
@@techexplorer7484 yt is deleting all my answers. It isn't local shop, it's both of green ones, one with quite nice pc part picker
@@techexplorer7484 green retailer that has something with TV (4th comment that got dl)
You should try the Portuguese educational laptop Magalhães, the terrible laptop the Portuguese government gave to a lot of childs (me included) that bankrupted this small country. It has dual boot between win xp and a portuguese linux distro, Caixa mágica
Nothing beats the Brazilian positivo mobo s7, it had a genormous dual bezel, comic sans keyboard, a weird ass linux distro running on an SD card (which breaks if you try to run and update it nowadays)... Beautiful thing!
@@SummonerArthur opa, that is a true nugget! your right
Was the computer given for free, or were they a part of your school intuition that you have to pay alongside? Your comment gave me so many childhood memories using Windows XP based computers because it was the only computer my family could afford. But now i got myself a gaming pc by the time i was old able to get a job.
@@mr-qt5oc most children got it for free, but for some reason i remember my mother had to pay 25€ for that. I remember that each school had laptop's that a child could "rent" for free, but this one was given. On the end, it became probably the biggest e-waste generator here (even though i still have mine)
Almost as if they are forcing what should've been an Apple ][ to behave like a full fledged Macintosh Plus (retro analogy)
Back in the day, what these were useful for is dumping footage off digital cameras on the go. Back when compact flash was expensive and you didn't have a bunch of spare storage options, you could use a cheap machine like that to offload files onto something larger, like an external USB drive. All you really needed was something that could work with USB ports.
14:19 Macross jumpscare - The image before at 14:16 looks extremely familiar, I think it was a really commonly shared piece of fanart. Will see if I can find a source.
looks like kanda yuu from d gray man.
So did you ever find the source? I bet the artist would get a kick out of hearing that their work somehow ended up on a random cheap Chinese not-a-computer.
Interesting, 11:20 the song name is in Chinese, reading "哥只是个传说" (I'm just a legend) sang by 陈旭 (Chen Xu).
What kind of "smartbook" is this preloaded with a Chinese pop song?
I don’t why but is kinda funny how the TH-cam auto-translate gets the translating wrong
Most likely it's from China and they just left it on there.
looks like they were having fun at the factory
It's that packaging that no-one likes
- a very dank man
Better bust out the Famous Toledo's!
I legit flinched when MJD Michael started talking about "carefully cracking" the package, mostly because the Dankest owner of Pods may have a habit of erm... Chaotically slaughtering those things with the Toledo's after saying something along those lines.. xD
unexpected dankpods reference, very happy
I remember seeing these things when I worked at a Kmart back between 2008-2013. I am 100% certain I never saw anyone ever buy one lol
“Windows Embedded Compact 7” man Microsoft is just great at naming things. Just rolls off the tongue
That software load is CRIMINAL. Whoever "designed" this thing couldn't care less about the consumer.
That's kinda obvious considering the whole "it's not a computer" thing.
It's a shovelware computer. Just slap a bunch of things together including stuff found on the internet to replace the stuff they didn't want to pay M$ for and sell it as is Cha-ching! More disposable junk to fill the landfills with. :-/
This feels an awful low like a situation where some marketing person saw these "Definitely not computers" in a Chinese manufacturing catalog and thought, "Oh, we can _totally_ undercut brands like Dell and HP and _corner_ the low-end market! I'm so smart" then throws the project at an engineer who actually understands the PC market and who knows this is thing is a joke and slapped together a disk image for this thing in an afternoon just to shut the other guy up.
The same visual appeal and formfactor as a portable DVD player with... LESS functionality. That's genuinely impressive.
For the right price, I think there's fun to be had with this thing.
The Macross/Robotech background on a SEALED product? That's insane.
30:56 here comes LGR in his duke nukem voice saying "Hmm, I feel a bit sluggish as of right now."
Sylvania, it's a computer. Stop denying it.
Looks like the OEM got the absolute cheapest windows mobile license SKU then scraped the internet to find 3rd party replacements for apps that are in the more expensive Windows Mobile version.
I’ve seen this edition on embedded industrial devices
This.
The fact that this thing can't even run DOS games in a playable state is an atrocity
i guess the port was bad or made for another system since these things don't use 86x cpu's dos games require an emulator
3:56
We gotta take a look at... The charger!
*throws the charger on the table*
There's the charger.
😂😂😂😂
I would love an entire episode of that "CE software collection" in a WinCE device, and trying other OSes on this one. If you are not allowed to entirely install other OS, if possible, you could try running them from the USB (Linux options at least). I think a version of Puppy Linux could work?
I love puppy Linux but I'm not sure modern pup would run well on this hardware.... I'm not sure anything modern would run very well. I'm thinking of trying to load Debian or Gentoo or something on the one I have
Android 2.2 runs on it. It's virtually useless but still
Fun fact: you could run android on this tiny thing although the highest I have been able to go is android 2.2
The Amazon redirect probably originally went to an affiliate link, so they get a very small cut of anything you purchased when you accessed it through that desktop shortcut. And I'm guessing they used the redirect so they could change the link if necessary.
the idea of a TH-cam app that uses an API to fetch site data is kind of cool and interesting. Nowadays that's really silly since we just do like, everything in browser or with a first party application, but for the target demo of a system like this, it's kind of a cool way to centralize sites like youtube to an app you just click on the desktop.
This is still done with cheap dvb t2 stb that has TH-cam and tiktok capability
it has an ISO \| _and_ an ANSI \|
for why…?
Windows guy is back at it again! keep up the good work ^^
If anyone was wondering, the text document's name translated to "New Text Document (2)"
The jankiness of Windows CE / Embedded Compact 7 surprises me again and again. Yeah these cheap Sylvania devices are trash now and were trash back then but it's the awful OS that blows my mind. It always reminds me of some kind of old bootleg Windows linux distro or a Windows-style theme pack for phones in the early 2000s.
It is abbreviated "WinCE" for a reason.
I'm still oddly happy "Tim Horton's netbook" is a combination of words that exists in reality.
@philtkaswahl2124 I don't know who wins Tim Horton's netbook or Hello Kitty motor oil
that photoviewer software and the weird included images almost broke my brain
i like it it gives it some personality
If I'm not mistaken, the keyboard in this thing comes from the cheapest tablet keyboards. I once had a "case" with such a keyboard. It was connected to a very thin micro USB. The "Zzz" function key worked like power button (I could force it to turn off just like real button). Btw it brakes two month after purchase.
Great video! I really like your channel, especially for the retrospectives. That browser reminds me of when I used IE 3 and Netscape in the 1990s! I also remember seeing these devices around the time the iPad came out. I never saw anyone by them.
Kind of reminds me of the Casio Cassiopeia Palmtop with Windows CE. My car Sat Nav system from 2008 runs Windows CE 5.0 on a DVD-ROM! ❤
I mean... At that point Doom wasn't even running, it was just walking 💀
Haha, that zooming-in on text boxes and making drop-down menus fill the screen is exactly the same behaviour as CE had on tiny PDAs... I remember plumbers and the gas man using these. It's quite useful on a tiny touchscreen with a stylus! On a laptop... not so much.
Happy canada day to you to man. As a canadian i actually kinda forgot it was even canada day, so glad you remembered
6:24 HEY! Chunky netbooks need love too!
The second image at 15:37 is the character Kanda Yu from D.Gray-man !
I have a similar netbook, brand name Jay-Tech. It's based on VIA's WM8505 SoC and it was my first Arm-based computer ever, even before the Raspberry Pi became available. I actually used it a lot as a pocket-sized Typewriter (smaller that Asus' first eeePC) and as mp3 player. There's a Debian hack for these WM8505-based machines that is maintained to this day. The WM8505 is a 300MHz Arm 5 SoC, so don't expect a gaming machine or a media center. But it ran the LXDE desktop and Abiword, so I was quite happy with it. Also, in 2010, lightweight browsers like Dillo were still quite usable. Oh, and Doom runs pretty well on this little gem on Linux.
That airbubbly screen film is a pixel perfect actual screenshot of the desktop you're booting into, with a slight shift in the panel from the bottom right so you have something to grab onto, and for some reason I find it amusing
You can identify piss poor electronics by noticing they are in that cheap ass plastic packaging rather than a proper box. Some exceptions do exist, like calculators but if you see a laptop, phone, etc in that kind of packaging and especially in a store not centered around tech it's probably gonna be shit. The sad thing is that it has more USB ports on it than my laptop that cost me almost $1000 when it was new.
Cheap electronics skimp on some things like build quality, while luxury electronics omit other obvious features
It’s got more USB than my 15” MacBook Pro
do you need more usb port tho? the fact is even if it has soo many usb port it's still shitty at most i see this use as second computer or maybe even storage device for someone whole ass document
@@minowilovemypetI need at least 5
27:53 the issues with color and the messed up title screen aren't the PC's problem, it's just a glitch in the source port you're using. Specifically with the video resolution and bit depth settings in the video settings with Doom Legacy (Which is the source port you're using)
Set the video resolution to 320x200 (Vanilla Doom's native resolution) and the bit depth to 8 or 16.
Also, the video resolution can also lag you out.
I think GE is more famous for their light bulbs. Sylvania is famous for those old TVs with the fake wood on the side and VCRs
No I think GE is famous for their kitchen supplies
They were both large old-school brands. Sylvania made tubes, light bulbs, and consumer electronics while GE made those as well as everything else electrical.
15:55 Neat lighthouse dude! 10/10!
The Jawbreaker / Bubble Breaker game came with Windows Mobile phones. Judging by the glitchy about screen, it's just running the Windows Mobile executable. My WM6 phone could start some apps designed for CE, but without a touchscreen they couldn't do much.
4:36 “Setting up your computer” … but I thought it wasn’t a computer? Lol
That Jawbreaker game was on my old Compaq C series Windows CE handheld (I can't remember which model it was but it was the high end colour version a couple of years before HP bought them out and created the Jornada series starting with the C series style). The game back then was called Bubble Pop not Jawbreaker. I used have a friend in Texas (I used to chat with him via ICQ as I am from the UK) who was from a rich family, he bought the same handheld as me and we used to have competitions to find the largest bubble chain in the infinite mode of the game. Even his dad got involved in the competition lol
EDIT: Correction, it was called Bubble Breaker not Bubble Pop (hey I had not used the machine since 2000!) and the actual name can be seen in the video on the taskbar while the game is running.
Wait, you said "Jawbreaker"? Is that a flipping *GEOMETRY DASH REFERENCE??????*
@@ShadowGD_OfficialYT I would hardly say it's a geometry dash reference when the machine he is showing came out around 7 years before the game. Though I just noticed something...
In the Start menu the game is called Jawbreaker, shown at 19:30 in the video, and Michael calls it that but while it's playing the Taskbar shows it as Bubble Breaker, which is actually the name of the old game, not Bubble Pop like I wrote. In my defence I was going from memory as the Compaq C series was late 1990's, I think I got my high end full colour model in 1998.The last time I used it was mid to late 2000.
@@j.tann1970 Hmm, ok then. I wonder if this machine could run some old popular Steam games, like *LIMBO...*
On my little CE PDA it was just called "O" (a picture of one of the balls). It was what I played when I didn't have time to play that awesome CE port of Age of Empires (for the time and hardware), but still had some time to kill.
How can a laptop be worse then the Tim Hortons laptop?
These plastics were impossible to open without destroying them
that's the point so you dont return
The "stupid book" was packaged like a toothbrush
installing linux with the lightest desktop manager is a good follow up
Michael, we need a dedicated video featuring the ENTIRE content of that CE softwares folder. Yes, please and thank you.
17:13 - That's What She Said I couldn't help myself.
Still has a bigger battery then the Rabbit R1 lol.
28:50 “the framerate is not super great”, that was absolutely the last think that popped into my head 😂
legendary case
your video was an eye-opener, thanks for the great insights! ️
i definetly didnt read this things name as "windows combat evolved"
i love this exploring series
9:20 It probably does that because it knows how small the screen is and it wants to show you just how horrible it actually is 😂
I happen to have the German version of this "netbook", the SD slot is supposed to eject the card when you push it in, it's not like a macbook
Hey Michael, cool video!
Could you share those anime pictures you found on this computer? I’d like to use them as wallpapers
Nice day for an MJD video!
This should be a series
Mjd never fails to amaze me
14:35 why does it come with a photo of a random anime twink from the early 2000’s? who preloaded that
Probably just some chinese factory worker / test team put it there for a reason or another. Maybe they even used some kind of disk image that had it added from the initial testing, and it's included in all of them. The meme song in media player recent items, would support that theory. I doubt they'll test every unit with a random meme song blasting at the factory.
Although I have to say, when I was young and innocent, and was working for a building automation company that delivered PC hardware to their customers, I frequently used to borrow the computers (mostly laptops) for the weekends and test drive them at home. I watched anime on them and listened to music, had some gaming done etc. Never had access to such nice hardware on my own. And as carefree I was, didn't usually had the smarts to clear recently opened files. Sometimes even copied some "legally obtained" anime flicks to the hard drive, and left it there. Or left some games installed. The machines were available for my personal needs maybe couple of weeks(ends), so I must've gone through nearly 100 different computer doing that.
And after 10+ years of working for the same company, there were many occasions to collect the old hardware from the customers when they renewed their PC. And when checking things out on the hard drive (so I don't delete anything important) before recycling the machine, I many times saw traces of my old questionable ecchi animes and some J-pop/Anime tunes I had listened to on that machine.
9:27 The mobile version of firefox does that and it's really annoying. I never understood why browser developers feel the need to change the zoom of the browser when clicking on things.
Next video: Loading other operating software on the Terrible Windows CE Netbook
*smartbook
(🤓 There I did it myself)
Maybe Debian?
Some sort of RTOS with desktop package maybe? QNX?
@@Erebus-PCFX postmarketOS
@@Erebus-PCFX That'll run on anything, lol...
"Damn, those alien bastards are gonna pay for shooting up my framerate" - Duke
Bro peeling that film actually looked like it was peeling the screen I was actually about to get pissed 😅
Babe wake up, Michael has dropped a new Video!
Would like to see how linux runs on it.
action retro already did a video on that
How is it possible that this thing isn't as powerful as a 486......It's a miracle
Put Linux on it.
I love the blue Pacman as the icon for IE!
Linux on this machine
Are you casting a spell?
I feel like this thing should run better than a 386 honestly. I wonder if you could do a clean install