LE1700 questions: HD, SSD, RAM upgrades

[danieledmunds]

Hi, I am a tablet newbie and have been waiting for one to come along that I might also be able to use for HD video output with a DVI port. The LE1700 seems to fill that criteria, on paper at least. Aside from that, it seems like an incredibly nice tablet PC.
My questions are:
Has anybody tried outputting 1080i/p video to an external 1080i/p device?
Can it play back H264 1080p or 720p files using Mplayer or VLC? I presume that MPEG2 at 1080p should be OK given the graphics and CPU.
How easy is it to upgrade the memory yourself and what memory should I buy if I was to do that?
How easily accessible is the hard disk if I ever wanted to replace the drive with a SSD? Has anyone done this yet? I realise that its 1.8" but its only a matter of time before this could be a reasonable upgrade.
Cheers, Dan

[John Hill]

I can only answer the last two questions:

1. Upgrading the memory is very easy. Two screws and you are in. Buy from Crucial.com

2. The hard disk is easily accessible. The most difficult part is copying the OS over to the new drive. Also, make sure the SSD you purchase has a ZIF connector.

[danieledmunds]

Thanks very much for the response, that has cleared up a couple of nagging questions. The Motion salesman assured me that the LE1700 would be fine for playing back 1080p video (I'm not sure he understood the ramifications of h264 playback though)), I guess I will have to discover this for myself.

[danieledmunds]

I thought I would post an update on the notion of outputting Hi-def video over the DVI connection to an HDTV as I have seen several people asking about this and what kind of performance could be expected. At my work I have access to laptops that have exactly the same Intel onboard graphics cards as in the LE1600 and LE1700 (Intel 915GMS and Intel 950 ). I have also tried differing speeds of processors that are close to those of the Motion tablets as well.
From what I have found, the graphics card is most important in rendering high bit rate HD video at resolutions of 720p and 1080p, processor speed helps but doesn't seem to be the determining factor.
Centrino based laptops of 1.5, 1.6, 1.8 Ghz with the Intel 915GMS all equally seemed able to render H264 compressed 720p files pretty smoothly (no noticeable skipping) but ONLY when using Windows Media Player classic and with no other programs running. VLC tended to jump quite a lot as did MPlayer - the only other lightweight H264 HD media players I know of. 1080i MPEG2, not being as compressed, played back smoothly with most media software.
I, hopefully, will be getting a LE1600 fairly soon and I can put this to the test but I imagine with a bit of tweaking, light apps and fast codecs you could get decent 720p H264/1080i MPEG2 HD playback. The only limiting factor might be the frontside bus speed of 400mhz as opposed to 533mhz in the laptops.
Suffice to say, there is no chance you are going to get highly compressed 1080p playing on a LE1600.

I then tried a 1080p H264 video on a laptop with a 1.8ghz core duo and Intel 950 chipset (about as close as I could get to a LE1700, again, graphics chipset being the focus). Playback was very jumpy and locked up, it was completely unwatchable. I tried this video on a few machines and it played back smoothly on an old 2.8ghz Xeon server but that had a Radeon 9700pro gaming graphics card in it. The 9700pro has 128mb of video memory like the Intel 915 but has a dedicated image processor and GDDR memory which is what I would attribute the performance increase to, even though the card itself is quite old. Without someone actually trying this with a LE1700 its hard to say exactly whether it would be able to handle 1080p files. My suspicion, based on the laptop Intel 950 experience, is that it wouldn't.
If and when I get a LE1600 rigged up, I will post my findings. It seems that outputting the highest quality, ahem, 'acquired' HD media is out of reach for tablet PCs.

[nuclear]

I need a SSD. So far i am seeing a lot of 32GB 1.8" IDE SSD's compatible. By January 64GB SSD's will be introduced at price $900.
Although you can make a 16GB CF IDE Drive easily for $100. I did one and it works perfectly fine and much faster than the existing HDD. I am running vista on it. When 32GB CF becomes available i will upgrade to it. Its a much cheaper solution than SSD's.
Does anyone know any good place to buy 32GB 1.8" SSD?

[danieledmunds]

There is a site called DVnation that does compatible hard drivs. What sort of adapter do you need to make a CF card bootable? Can the Motion BIOS handle that without an upgrade?

[nuclear]

Indeed. you need a CF Card to 1.8" IDE Adapter. Worked fine in my LE1600

[danieledmunds]

Can I ask which brand you went for? I read somewhere that depending on the disk, it may not be understood by the BIOS at the correct DMA speed. They were saying that SANdisk were the only ones that were compliant. However I would certainy like to try the Lexar UDMA 300x which should also be. Are you not concerned by the limited number of write cycles that compact flash as?

[danieledmunds]

There is a UK distributer called Future Storage who told me they will be releasing 1.8" drives in the next month or two. They don't know if they will be ZIF or micro-ATA at the moment. They seem pretty competetive (here at least), they have 64Gb 2.5" drive for #163;700, considering the drives are 100mbps read/write that seems like a good deal. Hopefully this will stay the same for the 1.8" drives. http://www.futurestorage.co.uk/?gclid=CIT-37eOm48CFQ3bQAodcgydKA

[danieledmunds]

That should read 700 pounds

[nuclear]

16GB CF Card. The best i dont know which one but i bought Samsung 150X. Ridata has a 233X card too for $150. Go for that if you want more speed. They all will work regardless. Good luck. An IDE adaptor was supplied with my Samsung 150X Card. Sandisk Extreme III is too expensive. Rather get a SSD then.

[danieledmunds]

just got my le1600 up n running, I put in an extra 1gb. Using combinations of haali media splitter, vlc and mplayer I have managed to get .mkv and divx h264 720p files playing perfectly! So far, the 1080i mpeg2 file i have got, plays smoothly but without sound (i need to get the right codec installed) in wmpclassic and vlc. mplayer has sound but is jumpy, unfortunately. when looking at task manager, it looks as though cpu and memory are ok so i think the bandwidth of the hard drive is the bottleneck. I am also having trouble getting an external monitor recognised over vga so can't check 1080p resolutions. when i have coreavc installed i will try these again.

[danieledmunds]

1080i (think it might actually be 1080p..) mpeg2 files now working perfectly in windows media classic, I just needed to install the AC3 filter. When I get the DVI cable, I will try to get this working over HDMI. Incidentally, a USB to serial cable works for cisco kit.

[nuclear]

Confirmed 16GB CF SSD is not enough to support windows vista. But it is highly optimized to run Windows XP.

[bmhome1]

Using vLite freeware, a Vista install can be trimmed easily to under 6GB with full tablet features. My vLite'd install of Home Premium has been flawless since 2-07.

[nuclear]

Thanks I have performed two amazing upgrades to the LE1600 and the benchmarks were amazing.
1. I used Wireless N Mini-PCI card and got 300mbps
2. I used Gigabit LAN and got 1000mbps
3. I used external RAID 0 Raptor hard drives and transferred at 30MB/s

16GB storage space isnt enough. I am using 30GB on my 60GB built in without any personal additions. All of them are for professional use.

[matt6]

quote:Originally posted by nuclear

Thanks I have performed two amazing upgrades to the LE1600 and the benchmarks were amazing.
1. I used Wireless N Mini-PCI card and got 300mbps
2. I used Gigabit LAN and got 1000mbps
3. I used external RAID 0 Raptor hard drives and transferred at 30MB/s

16GB storage space isnt enough. I am using 30GB on my 60GB built in without any personal additions. All of them are for professional use.

Can you please elaborate on point 1, 2, and 3? Your complete setup for each of these?

I smell something fishy here...

[danieledmunds]

finally, I have my LE 1600 hooked up to my projector.

I bought a regular DVI to HDMl cable and the Motion Computing DVI cable. The latest drivers didn't work but the factory install ones did and I got it displaying. After it detected the projector, I had to reboot a couple of times and then success!

The display was true 1080p and it was quite cool virtually graffiti ing my living room wall.

Then the bad news. . .
Even with uncompressed 1080p video and a lightweight player it was too much for my poor 1.5 ghZ centrino. Static images are fine, moving ones not. It would he interesting to see if the LE 1700 could cope.

Now the good news. . .
It plays, even compressed, files in 720p very well. Not completely flawlessly, it speeds up / slows a little bit, say every half an hour but its only for about 30 seconds and quickly corrects itself. Certainly doesn't spoil movie watching.

So, I will be busy watching various, as yet unreleased on HD, blockbusters. Sorry Mr. Lucas and Mr. Jackson!