Retro Computing

Yesterday I surprised myself by successfully resurrecting my ancient HTC Advantage. This looks like a tiny Windows computer, which it is, but it's also a phone. I abandoned it, for a Galaxy Note 2, when it stopped recognising my password and became unusable. I have two of these intriguing devices, the second was a present from my former boss. His Advantage had been stolen, from a car, and later recovered. He no longer had a use for it, so a second HTC Advantage joined my small collection of pocket computers.

Unsaleable?

Should I stick them on eBay? Probably not a good idea without a thorough purge of their memory. Internal storage is not from flash memory, instead it uses an 8 GB Microdrive. This is a 2.54 cm IBM hard drive, not the Sinclair tape drive of the same name.

Pining for the Fjords

Both machines seemed almost dead, the only sign of life being the charging indicator, a red ring around the joystick mouse controller. I checked that the battery doors were properly closed and found the gifted machine's battery missing. A pity, as my original battery isn't great. I tried pressing the reset button and every key combination I could think of, but couldn't get them to talk to me. Eventually I noticed that the power button isn't a power button at all … I'd been pressing the volume control!

It's alive!

A longish push on the power button brings up a boot screen. A few moments later a second screen appears, a status LED blinks, and then … it powers off. Oh.

I plugged it into the 2 Amp port of a battery "power brick" and left it alone. Many hours later the charge light went green, and I could boot it into a Windows start screen. Sweet! It claimed I had new mail. A tap on the resistive touch-screen brought up Outlook with my 2012 email. Oh… I've completely bypassed the security and have full access to personal details. I was right about not selling them.

HTC Advantage

Resurrection

The machine's been restored to it's state at last use. My emails are there. If pull up the media player a Green Door album appears appears. After a few seconds I get a notification that my paid-for navigation add-on needs to update its data.

Unsurprisingly the battery's barely there, 5% charge according to Windows. That's not going to last long off-charge. I recently found its car mount, though I'm unlikely to use this phone in a car.

The Advantage is still a fun machine, and I intend to spend some time playing with it over the next few days.

Re-use

I used to write software for Pocket PCs, at Navarasoft; seems a lifetime ago. Pretty sure I have the C++ compiler for PPC in my MSDN Universal archive. Might be fun to write some old-school software for the wee beast.

I still have a second machine to resuscitate. Hopefully it'll burst into life if I transfer the battery to it.

Stay tuned for updates. Comments welcome via Twitter.

03-AUG-2020 👈 Top of page 👉 06-AUG-2020

Find me coding on GitHub, networking on LinkedIn, answering questions on Stack Exchange and hanging out on twitter.