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Itronix GoBook MR-1 Screen Issue

NeXT

Veteran Member
Joined
Oct 22, 2008
Messages
8,096
Location
Kamloops, BC, Canada
I was nudged to buy this thing AS-IS because of how rare they are and it was $75cad shipped from one province over. This felt really uncanny. Way back in 2011 or 2012 I had taken my PC110 to a meeting of the Seattle Retrocomputing Society when it was still held in the then unopened Living Computer Museum and one of the employees disappeared into a side office and returned with a UMPC that is strikingly similar in dimensions and layout to the MR-1. It was a prototype of a product he had worked on, partially funded by Paul Allen called the Vulcan FlipStart. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulcan_FlipStart
The machine I received is especially weird. It's got Sierra Wireless/Qualcomm stickers, it has no FCC id, the serial number is bogus and while I'm told the shipped units had textured case plastics these are completely smooth leading to a group conclusion this is a prototype machine. The equally prototype Qualcomm 3G Mini PCIe module lives behind the LCD so between that, the only missing screws being in the screen bezel and the white screen we guess this was being used to test and qualify the Sierra Wireless WWAN option the MR-1 could be optioned with and after repeated insertions and removals something in the screen assembly had either broken or worn out. Visually the connectors and boards seemed fine.
We swapped parts around with other known good units and eventually determined that if the prototype radio was both installed OR missing the screen was just white, BUT if I stuffed in a newer 4G module it worked, so while the video signal and the radio are separate wiring they share something in common. We tried poking around and flexing various points but could not find any areas of interest where there could be a short or a weak connection.
Yeah, I don't get it either.

So we got the LCD back and it would boot into XP, loaded with all the software and logs to confirm this was indeed being used to test the functionality of the radio. There's even a recovery partition and the date codes everywhere say it was last powered on in 2008. Curiously I noticed our white screen issues were still with us. If I used the key sequence to turn off the radio and the wi-fi the screen instantly died and went white. Press the key combo again to enable the radios and it came right back. So SOMETHING electrically was being shared.
Now it gets weirder.
When this was last used they had the Intel A/B/G wi-fi adapter enabled in Windows, but the radio was turned off in the Intel control panel. I switched that back on and boom, screen again fails but now it's not working regardless of turning all the radios on or off, so I had to borrow the port replicator to mirror the display on an external monitor and turn the wi-fi radio back off, then the internal screen instantly came back.

The lithium battery that makes up the bottom of the unit is dead and unobtanium so I would not be too upset putting this on a shelf as a display piece given how it seems to be very fragile in terms of wi-fi functionality but what could be the issue here? What would be shared between the screen and the mini PCIe slots?
 
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