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AlphaTop/ECS Green Laptop documentation thread.

3lectr1c

3lectr1c

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This thread is for myself and anyone else to post findings and documentation info related to AlphaTop and ECS Elitegroup laptops that were part of the "Green" series, sold by various local distributors throughout the 90s and 2000s, including Micron, NEC, WinBook, Jetta, Gericom, and many others.

Same sort of idea as my previous two thread here on:
WinBook: https://forum.vcfed.org/index.php?t...op-brands-winbook.1242548/page-4#post-1352802
and
CTX: https://forum.vcfed.org/index.php?threads/documenting-obscure-90s-laptop-brands-ctx-ezbook.1245407/
laptops.

I am currently working on documenting these laptops on my website. I do not have any pages on these laptops live yet, but I will be putting out one next time I update the live copy of the site.
Currently, I've processed through the AlphaTop laptops in the series. So far, my main resource has been @DeltaDon's old site, orphanlaptops.com (offline, use WayBack to browse) which has been quite helpful. I do however suspect that AlphaTop released more laptops that we don't yet know about, or have ANY info on. According to Don's site, ECS bought AlphaTop in 2001 (which is why later Green laptops were made by them), but we don't seem to have any models documented that match the specs you'd expect in a laptop from 2000, leaving a gap. I also found an FCC listing for a "GREEN400" which isn't documented anywhere.

I'll post further updates here as I process through all the information I have, and link to new site pages when I get them out.
Don may also have some info to add here, he has extensive experience working on some of their older models.
 
GVC's website (AlphaTop was a division of GVC) was picked up by the wayback machine, but it renders heavily broken and it isn't able to be navigated properly. I still dug through saved URLs anyway, and managed to find the URLs for their laptop division: https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.gvc.com:80/eng/asia/pcnote/*
Pages were saved for the G756, G759, G760, and the G770.
These pages only have specs, nothing else, but it's still a useful find. Don's site had full specs up for the G770 and the g759, but did not have specsheets up for the G756 and G760, so we have that now.
I don't think I'm getting anything else out of that broken site though. The archives only go back to 1998 as well, I wonder if they had an older domain that could get info on older laptops.
 
Searching through ecsusa.com now.
Just found this:
g732e-s.jpg
Yes, I know, it's about as low-res as it gets (the larger main image didn't get saved, this is just the thumbnail) but check this out. Don had mentioned a Green736 with a large screen that extended past the base of the laptop, and I finally found a photo of it. This is actually what ECS called the Green732 16" or the G732E, and you can find its specs here: https://web.archive.org/web/20031010010452/http://www.ecsusa.com/PRODUCTS/G732E.HTML

Maybe Don misremembered and it was a 732 and not a 736? Or maybe there was also a 736 with the same wacky screen. I haven't found a reference to one yet though. The G732 and G736 do share the same overall design, the G736 just had faster processor support.

Apparently these screens were either SXGA+ or UXGA. I can't tell whether it's widescreen or not. It looks widescreen in the photo, but ECS wrote "SXGA+" and not "WXGA+" in the specsheet so it could go either way. Either way, this thing looks utterly hideous and I want one.

Strangely enough, ECS appears to have purged info on this thing before too long. Later page captures don't mention it at all, this one's from late 2003.
 
Here's a page from Maxtech (looks like they were one of the major GVC distributors? May also be a division of GVC?): https://web.archive.org/web/20230000000000*/http://www.maxtech.com/html/prod-notebooks.html
Gives good info on most of the AlphaTop laptops.

I also found this old news link: https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/biz/archives/2002/08/27/0000165793
This confirms that GVC's laptop division was indeed known as Alpha-Top, and is stylized as "Alpha-Top" and not AlphaTop or Alpha Top.
I had yet to see any documentation besides Don's site that confirmed this.
This also gives the exact month that Alpha-Top was bought by ECS - August. This means that the Green500 (WinBook X1) and the Green720 (WinBook J1) were actually made by Alpha-Top, not ECS as I previously thought!

Researching this stuff is fun.
 
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Section on these laptops is now live on my site with today's update: https://macdat.net/pc/green_home.html

For the time being, this page really just provides a list of models, some photos, and links to where you can find specs and more info (mainly from orphanlaptops and ecs themselves), however, I'll begin to move this info directly onto the site "soon".

The main goal right now was to get info accessible on the surface web again, as all the pages I've linked to are stuff I've found on the wayback machine and can't be searched for.

I also don't have the full list finished for the ECS laptops yet, but I do believe that it's mostly complete.
 
Neat. Would be nice if we could get the service manuals scanned at some point in the future. They'd be good to have saved.

And of course they made two similar looking laptops with such similar names. Of course they did.
 
Aw man, you lost them? That's a shame. I'll try to make my own teardown guide at some point. I think I'm gonna have to tear mine apart all the way in order to get that darned varta battery out once it arrives. Any advice on getting the hinge covers off without breaking the clips? Might not even be possible at this point with how brittle the plastic has gotten.
I'm tempted to just gently twist it until metal fatigue causes the legs to break off. I've done that in the past, but never with one that hadn't leaked yet, and I would be worried about damaging the board... I'll have to see when it gets here. Shame they soldered it.
 
If you wish to remove the CMOs battery - have at it. As I've stated, I've yet to see one leaking CMOS battery on maybe 200+ Green 753's. But that's just me. OBTW, I have a bag of NOS CMOS batteries in case you wish to replace the batttery in the future - but they too are old.

There's a couple of weak case design parts on the Green 753's. First, the hinge covers slide on from the side, but are retained by very weak tabs on the case. The tabs break and my best solution to fix is using some RTV to hold them in place. Nest, to disassemble the laptop to remove the motherboard you run into the next weak part. The plastic center cover over the small status LCD pops off from the back, but has two tiny tabs on the front that break off more than 50% of the time. More RTV is the solution. Other than those two common failure points the other more or less standard failure on many laptops including the G753 is the hinges. Way under engineered four screws - two through the LCD bezel and two more hidden behind the bezel are supposed to take all the abuse from wear and tear, plus hinges that get tight over time. Plus the fact that the plastics used to make the case pieces was mystery blend of polycarbonate that IMHO was more like cheap as chips polystyrene. Solution? None really! I use a ton of epoxy plus fiberglass to reinforce broken mounts. I've also used window screen scraps when I had some from repairing screens. Not just on the Green laptops - but just about any laptop that needed hinge repairs.

Going around and tightening screws for hinges and in general seems to be a good idea as loose screws lead to more stress on weak plastics.

Lastly, there's an issue with the CD-ROM drives. They are pre-Atapi connector Teac's (99%) that don't use the Oak driver and require their own driver to be installed (including on floppy) to be seen by DOS/Windows. They also don't like burnt CD's from modern burners. Microsoft OEM CD's read nearly 100% of the time, but copies made on high speed burners fail to read. Normal DOS limits on hard drive partition size of 2GB and BIOS limited size of 8GB is "normal" for this era laptop. Ontrack or EZ-Drive can allow larger drives, but I find a 2, 4 or 8GB CF card with adapter is an easy solution to finding a PATA hard drive - if you get the MBR set to allow booting. Rufus or other software for this.

I would be interested in seeing if the Green 753 AC adapter powers a NanTan 4 pin laptop too. It's rated at 19V output, not the varible voltage rating of the NanTan adapters.
 
Hmm. I'll have to see when I get it in, I'd normally not be so hesitant to cause a few broken clips here and there but this one's gonna be brand new!
On the Varta batteries leaking - I'm curious, when was it that you got the experience of taking apart hundreds of these? Has it been continuous over the years or was most of it back when you ran your business in the 2000s? These really only start to leak after 20 years in my own experience, so if your data comes from when they were 10 years old, yeah, it would make sense that you've never seen a leak.
It seems at least that these brand new ones don't leak. This is consistent with what I've seen in larger NiMH batteries where the chances of a leak seem to go dramatically up if the battery has been used. For instance, I don't think I've ever seen a PowerBook 5300 that didn't have a mess inside of it from a main battery leak, seems they ALL go and leak badly at this current point in their age. But recently, a guy on eBay has been liquidating inventory including NOS 5300 batteries, all intact, and still holding charge. Why? Because they were brand new I'd reckon.

That's to say, I'll bet the Varta in mine works once it gets here, but I just can't live with trusting it myself. I have no idea how long it will remain working. Could have a normal life, or could last a year and then suddenly start leaking when I least expect it.
I would like to replace it, my plan is to buy a similar spec battery newly made by a guy on eBay, meant for Toshiba laptops. It has a connector on it, so I should be able to just chop that off, strip back the wires, and solder to the board directly to replace the original. I'd rather trust that than a NOS one from...some...time.

Also -

I found a video from Adrian's Digital Basement of him opening one of these last night that I somehow missed. His seemed to have pretty bad quality sound output and that got me curious - is that normal behavior for these, or is there some age-related failure involved? His unit also had the LCD lid latch break on first use - was that a one off or should I expect the same out of mine?
I'm not upset or worried about either of these by the way, it's "new" but still 25 years old of course, I'd be crazy to expect everything to still be perfect. Plus, it's no ThinkPad. Just curious.

I've got a Pentium 166 non-mmx, 32MB of FPM RAM that I think should be compatible, and an IDE to SD adapter with an 8GB card on the way. Should get it all up and running.
 
DeltaDon said:
I wish the Green 753 and Green 753+ manuals didn't go home with a fellow that I helped get his Green 753 working. No good deed.......
Click to expand...
...goes unpunished :) I hate/love how true that is!

3lectr1c said:
Hmm. I'll have to see when I get it in, I'd normally not be so hesitant to cause a few broken clips here and there but this one's gonna be brand new!
On the Varta batteries leaking - I'm curious, when was it that you got the experience of taking apart hundreds of these? Has it been continuous over the years or was most of it back when you ran your business in the 2000s? These really only start to leak after 20 years in my own experience, so if your data comes from when they were 10 years old, yeah, it would make sense that you've never seen a leak.
It seems at least that these brand new ones don't leak. This is consistent with what I've seen in larger NiMH batteries where the chances of a leak seem to go dramatically up if the battery has been used. For instance, I don't think I've ever seen a PowerBook 5300 that didn't have a mess inside of it from a main battery leak, seems they ALL go and leak badly at this current point in their age. But recently, a guy on eBay has been liquidating inventory including NOS 5300 batteries, all intact, and still holding charge. Why? Because they were brand new I'd reckon.

That's to say, I'll bet the Varta in mine works once it gets here, but I just can't live with trusting it myself. I have no idea how long it will remain working. Could have a normal life, or could last a year and then suddenly start leaking when I least expect it.
I would like to replace it, my plan is to buy a similar spec battery newly made by a guy on eBay, meant for Toshiba laptops. It has a connector on it, so I should be able to just chop that off, strip back the wires, and solder to the board directly to replace the original. I'd rather trust that than a NOS one from...some...time.

Also -

I found a video from Adrian's Digital Basement of him opening one of these last night that I somehow missed. His seemed to have pretty bad quality sound output and that got me curious - is that normal behavior for these, or is there some age-related failure involved? His unit also had the LCD lid latch break on first use - was that a one off or should I expect the same out of mine?
I'm not upset or worried about either of these by the way, it's "new" but still 25 years old of course, I'd be crazy to expect everything to still be perfect. Plus, it's no ThinkPad. Just curious.

I've got a Pentium 166 non-mmx, 32MB of FPM RAM that I think should be compatible, and an IDE to SD adapter with an 8GB card on the way. Should get it all up and running.
Click to expand...
3lectr1c, it's inspiring how dedicated you are to these old beasts. I love manky old laptops too, they're weirdly charming with how compromised and limited they are when compared to desktops of the time, but to go out of my way and scrape every last bit of remaining information on the web about an obscure portable from the mid-90's, document it in its entirety and post findings on my own website is something I don't quite have the patience and will to do.
The work on the WinBook page is very nice, I've got to say, and with the way you're going, macdat may very well become the best (and only, really) resource for "portable ancient crap"!

PS, I'll send a couple of photos of my FMA3300 when I get around to testing and assembling it, probably in about a week or two.
PPS: how do you manage your site? Is it pure HTML? That would be quite painful.
 
JamieDoesStuff said:
3lectr1c, it's inspiring how dedicated you are to these old beasts. I love manky old laptops too, they're weirdly charming with how compromised and limited they are when compared to desktops of the time, but to go out of my way and scrape every last bit of remaining information on the web about an obscure portable from the mid-90's, document it in its entirety and post findings on my own website is something I don't quite have the patience and will to do.
The work on the WinBook page is very nice, I've got to say, and with the way you're going, macdat may very well become the best (and only, really) resource for "portable ancient crap"!
Click to expand...
I'm glad that people appreciate my work :)
That's really how I feel about these old (any maybe kind of junky) laptops. They're definitely worse than desktops, but in my opinion, they're a lot more fun. Frustrating sometimes yes, but fun. And each one offers a unique experience. I've found that for me, desktops get boring after the first couple because unless you've got the space, each one is hooked up to the same couple sets of peripherals, so they all up feeling kind of the same to use, performance aside. Once you've seen about a dozen different beige box desktops, you've seen them all. Yet after all this research, I still regularly find laptop designs that I come across that make me think "haven't seen that yet".
The goal is just info preservation to every extent possible. I've got the patience to do it, so I might as well.

If I do reach the point where I can consider it the "best" resource, I'm totally putting "The web's best resource on portable ancient crap" as a tagline.

JamieDoesStuff said:
PS, I'll send a couple of photos of my FMA3300 when I get around to testing and assembling it, probably in about a week or two.
PPS: how do you manage your site? Is it pure HTML? That would be quite painful.
Click to expand...
Photos would be great!

Site is managed in pure HTML. Probably not the most convenient way, but I like the 100% control, and doing everything in code doesn't bother me much. Plus, it's all pretty simple. I make the site look decent with a background image and a few jpeg tiles, I'm not very good at this sort of thing. Site has no javascript. It's all just tables and a few divs. The benefits of that are that it has the retro feel, and it (mostly) renders in old browsers.
If you want to see more of how the code works, I've had a page since launch where you can just download the whole site as a ZIP file: https://macdat.net/extras/web_dl.html
macdatdev.PNG
Yep, that's Windows 7.
Code shown is for a re-designed laptop portal main page I cooked up over the past day or so.

newtiles.PNG
I figured the nav-bar tile based interface would get out of hand quickly as I added more brands, so I may or may not have taken inspiration from @DeltaDon's old site.
I think this looks better than the old one. Next update should have some documentation up for NEC and FIC laptops.

What I think I'm going to do with the next update is just to create a general project thread here, rather than separate thread for each brand I'm working on documenting. I don't want to clutter up the forums with a bunch of threads. In hindsight, I should have done that initially. Now I'm going to end up creating a 4th and final thread for this project when I should have always just had one.
 
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I've been working on Green laptops since 2000 more or less. I sold quite few back in my early days of running my company and have been repairing and selling a few at a time out of my broken stock pile since about 2010. I've got maybe 25 to 50 damaged Green 753's in need of repair. None for CMOS battery damage. I also have perhaps the same number of Green 753+ laptops that need work and while they use a different CMOS battery, I don't recall any of them killed because of a leaking CMOS battery. I'm not saying that the batteries won't leak ever in the future, just that in my experience it's not a major issue at this time. They are rechargeable and so precautions need to be taken if replacing the existing battery with stacked 2032's. An added diode would be necessary to revent trying to charge the 2032's. If you are concerned and wish to just remove the CMOS battery, have at it. It's not for me to tell anyone what to do with something they own. I'm just glad to see a bunch of these get out into the hands of retro computer people and not gather dust in my basement.
 
One thing I do notice is that these use very small cells, 3/V15H. The WinBook XP that has the same 3 cell battery uses larger 3/V60H or similar cells I believe. They’re thicker and I wonder if they’re more prone to leaking than the smaller ones. Food for thought at least.

Edit: just looked though and many of my own packs that have leaked use the V15 cells. They are 6/V15 though, not 3/V15. Perhaps those cause more trouble? Or is that just talking about pack configuration (cell count) and not voltage? I don’t think so though, I have a 3 cell pack that leaked that’s marked 6/V15

In the future, if you’re trying to get rid of other one off models, don’t hesitate let me know, there’s a good chance I’d buy some of them. I’d be particularly interested in the G751 if you can get it to post and do decide to ever get rid of it.

Here’s photos of the one inside the WinBook XP
https://imgur.com/a/VilC49g
 
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I don't want to get your hopes up, but I might have stashed away a Green 732 or Green 736 with the oversized LCD and flippy speakers. One of these days I'll uncover it if I do have one. I do have some Green 730 series laptops. Some might be Winbook labeled. I do have some spare plastic and other parts for this series of laptops. Again, jumbled up in a stack of stuff I'm still digging through. I just found some Clevo D470 and D870 monsters to test.
 
DeltaDon said:
If you wish to remove the CMOs battery - have at it. As I've stated, I've yet to see one leaking CMOS battery on maybe 200+ Green 753's. But that's just me. OBTW, I have a bag of NOS CMOS batteries in case you wish to replace the batttery in the future - but they too are old.

There's a couple of weak case design parts on the Green 753's. First, the hinge covers slide on from the side, but are retained by very weak tabs on the case. The tabs break and my best solution to fix is using some RTV to hold them in place. Nest, to disassemble the laptop to remove the motherboard you run into the next weak part. The plastic center cover over the small status LCD pops off from the back, but has two tiny tabs on the front that break off more than 50% of the time. More RTV is the solution. Other than those two common failure points the other more or less standard failure on many laptops including the G753 is the hinges. Way under engineered four screws - two through the LCD bezel and two more hidden behind the bezel are supposed to take all the abuse from wear and tear, plus hinges that get tight over time. Plus the fact that the plastics used to make the case pieces was mystery blend of polycarbonate that IMHO was more like cheap as chips polystyrene. Solution? None really! I use a ton of epoxy plus fiberglass to reinforce broken mounts. I've also used window screen scraps when I had some from repairing screens. Not just on the Green laptops - but just about any laptop that needed hinge repairs.

Going around and tightening screws for hinges and in general seems to be a good idea as loose screws lead to more stress on weak plastics.

Lastly, there's an issue with the CD-ROM drives. They are pre-Atapi connector Teac's (99%) that don't use the Oak driver and require their own driver to be installed (including on floppy) to be seen by DOS/Windows. They also don't like burnt CD's from modern burners. Microsoft OEM CD's read nearly 100% of the time, but copies made on high speed burners fail to read. Normal DOS limits on hard drive partition size of 2GB and BIOS limited size of 8GB is "normal" for this era laptop. Ontrack or EZ-Drive can allow larger drives, but I find a 2, 4 or 8GB CF card with adapter is an easy solution to finding a PATA hard drive - if you get the MBR set to allow booting. Rufus or other software for this.

I would be interested in seeing if the Green 753 AC adapter powers a NanTan 4 pin laptop too. It's rated at 19V output, not the varible voltage rating of the NanTan adapters.
Click to expand...
Tried my green753 adapter on my NanTan FMA7600 and it doesn't have enough amperage to power it fully (dim screen, slowness, etc). Also the NanTan has part of the charging circuit in the adapter whereas the green753 doesn't.
 
3lectr1c said:
Hmm. I'll have to see when I get it in, I'd normally not be so hesitant to cause a few broken clips here and there but this one's gonna be brand new!
On the Varta batteries leaking - I'm curious, when was it that you got the experience of taking apart hundreds of these? Has it been continuous over the years or was most of it back when you ran your business in the 2000s? These really only start to leak after 20 years in my own experience, so if your data comes from when they were 10 years old, yeah, it would make sense that you've never seen a leak.
It seems at least that these brand new ones don't leak. This is consistent with what I've seen in larger NiMH batteries where the chances of a leak seem to go dramatically up if the battery has been used. For instance, I don't think I've ever seen a PowerBook 5300 that didn't have a mess inside of it from a main battery leak, seems they ALL go and leak badly at this current point in their age. But recently, a guy on eBay has been liquidating inventory including NOS 5300 batteries, all intact, and still holding charge. Why? Because they were brand new I'd reckon.

That's to say, I'll bet the Varta in mine works once it gets here, but I just can't live with trusting it myself. I have no idea how long it will remain working. Could have a normal life, or could last a year and then suddenly start leaking when I least expect it.
I would like to replace it, my plan is to buy a similar spec battery newly made by a guy on eBay, meant for Toshiba laptops. It has a connector on it, so I should be able to just chop that off, strip back the wires, and solder to the board directly to replace the original. I'd rather trust that than a NOS one from...some...time.

Also -

I found a video from Adrian's Digital Basement of him opening one of these last night that I somehow missed. His seemed to have pretty bad quality sound output and that got me curious - is that normal behavior for these, or is there some age-related failure involved? His unit also had the LCD lid latch break on first use - was that a one off or should I expect the same out of mine?
I'm not upset or worried about either of these by the way, it's "new" but still 25 years old of course, I'd be crazy to expect everything to still be perfect. Plus, it's no ThinkPad. Just curious.

I've got a Pentium 166 non-mmx, 32MB of FPM RAM that I think should be compatible, and an IDE to SD adapter with an 8GB card on the way. Should get it all up and running.
Click to expand...
my experience with the Varta NiMH batteries has been that they leak when they sit unused (uncharged) for many many years. But when they are used off and on they don't leak. NiCD batteries are a different story - those are the WORST and are very destructive. As for these NOS green753's they seem to be fine even though they sat unused for years (it could be just because they held a nonminimal charge all these years). Just keep using it so it gets charged and keep an eye on it. I believe you could clip it off from the top and solder on a new battery or leads to a CR2032 - just don't forget to add a diode if you go that route.
 
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