Getac A770 Rugged Laptop

[Fraser]

This is a long shot but does anyone else on the forum own a Getac A770 rugged laptop please ?

I need to build an operating system on the hard drive for mine from scratch and do not have the WinXP drivers. All known sources have been tried including GETAC (no longer supported), DOLCH and Kontron (using the Wayback Machine).

If all else fails, I will identify each and every part of the laptops hardware and source the individual drivers from the OEM.

This is not the most common of laptops but I thought I would ask, just in case.

TIA

Fraser

[Halcyon]

I wonder if the A790 uses similar hardware? It has plenty of downloads available on their Asia-Pacific site. Otherwise I'd be going OEM as their drivers will probably be easier to get hold of and possibly later versions. Let us know how you go so others reading this can benefit.

[dexters_lab]

i'd get windows xp installed and go from there, chipset drivers first then pick off each missing driver unless there is something very unusual about the system board

[Fraser]

Many thanks for the good advice.

The A770 arrived with me today and, as expected, its hard disk is just two blank partitions.

I am blown away by this amazingly solid Battleship of a laptop  It is in Mint condition, and I mean Mint, just like it came out of the factory. The BIOS is dated May 2006. This laptop has sat in a dust free environment or sealed in a box. There is no dust on its case or keyboard. It honestly looks brand spanking new ! In fact it may never have had an operating system loaded onto it as the customer is able to buy the unit without OS.

Today I started the driver identification work with a clean install of Windows 7. All went well and the installation found most of the required drivers. Only Audio, Modem, IRDA and Video were showing an asterisk in Device manager. I took a look at the PCI ID's associated with the devices listed in Device manager and now have a pretty good idea what resides in side the case.

Amazingly I think I already have most of the required drivers as it is very similar to another laptop of the same era, namely the Dell Latitude X300. That is also a Pentium M powered unit with the Intel i82801DB and i855GM chipset.

I have also downloaded all the drivers and utilities used in the A790 as some utilities may be specific to the GETAC laptops, such as the OSD, touchscreen and Keyboard shortcuts for, audio volume, screen brightness etc. The A790 uses a Core 2 Duo on a i945 chipset but that is not too far off the i855 chipset in terms of any utilities or drivers. The current Intel chipset driver covers the 855 and 945 chipsets anyway.

Thankfully there is nothing too unusual about the A770's architecture. It does have an internal heater, Keyboard shortcuts and a touchscreen but nothing to scary. What makes the A770 special is its amazingly rugged metal casing. It would look very at home in a Tank or Warship ! It is even a nice Battleship grey colour.

This laptop may be quite old, but I love its build quality .... it is an amazing build quality. Not that surprising as it was intended for military use and even appeared along side its sibling, the M230, in the film Mission Impossible ! I cannot remember which of the franchise though, maybe M.I. III

I am also impressed with its boot speed and how well it is running Windows 7. I will likely drop it back to WinXP for compatibility with my software and equipment though.

The unit cost me less than £60 so I am a very happy retro IT geek right now 

Fraser

[Halcyon]

The Getac's were popular among emergency services and very well built machines, I know NSW Ambulance here in Australia used them extensively. Although these days, Panasonic Toughbooks and Toughpads are more popular.

[Fraser]

Halcyon,

I have a few models of rugged laptop .....

Getac M230
Getac V200
Getac A770
General Dynamics XR1
General Dynamics GD8000
Durabook (Twinhead) U14M

Plus some Rugged Tablets as well.....

Getac GD3070
Durabook T7M
Durabook T7Q
Samwell SR800
JLT 8404
Itronix IX324

Enough to keep me amused for years to come 

The rugged computers that are designed for Military or Industrial use are great because they normally provide all manner of I/O port types to suit varied applications. Perfect for my needs as I use a lot of legacy equipment. Plus I love the build quality of these beasts 

Fraser

[Fraser]

I am very pleased to advise that I succeeded in completely rebuilding the WinXP Operating System on my lovely A770. GETAC USA came to my aid with a few of the required drivers for subsystems that I had not fully identified. They had to extract teh drivers from a legacy build disk they found. Most importantly the multimedia audio package. I am attaching some pictures of the result. The Device manager is nicely without any exclamation marks I had to do a bit of trial and error on the drivers front but ended up using the following:

1. Standard WinXP Professional 32bit Installation
2. Dell X300 i855 Chipset Driver (i82801DBM)
3. Latest Intel i855GM Graphics Accelerator Driver
4. Dell X300 Synaptics PS/2 Touchpad Driver
5. Getac A790 OSD driver
6. Getac provided A770 Smart Link Modem Driver
7. Getac provided A770 Intel Pro/100VE Ethernet driver
8. Getac provided A770 Realtek AC'97 Audio driver
9. usbehci.sys added to enable USB2 features etc.

The above collection of drivers have the A770 working perfectly. She even has the OSD graphics from the A790 working fine. The Chipset driver took care of the IEEE1394 and FIR drivers etc. All working fine.

I know this old girl is well beyond her intended lifespan but ,looking at the pictures, I hope you will agree that she has been well cared for and in lovely condition. Pretty good for a 12 year old rugged laptop me thinks It is not time for her to be recycled yet !

Fraser

[ebastler]

I am blown away by this amazingly solid Battleship of a laptop  It is in Mint condition, and I mean Mint, just like it came out of the factory. The BIOS is dated May 2006. This laptop has sat in a dust free environment or sealed in a box. There is no dust on its case or keyboard. It honestly looks brand spanking new ! In fact it may never have had an operating system loaded onto it as the customer is able to buy the unit without OS.

Congrats -- that is an impressive machine indeed!

Are these even meant to be in mint condition?! Time to drag it through some mud... 

It's great to hear that you were able to get it set up with all drivers so quickly. Quite impressive customer service from Getac!

[Fraser]

Ebastler,

My feelings about Getac on the support front are mixed.

They used to provide the drivers for most of their legacy computers but at some point, not so long ago, they deleted everything prior to the A790 from their servers and archives. Sadly the Wayback Machine shows the download links but did not capture the actual files. Some PDF files were captured though.

I contacted the Getac UK support team and the helpful lass asked her technical support team for help. Sadly they reported that all legacy drivers for the A770 were deleted This may be the common 10 year EOL-EOS rule that companies employ. Why they remove their driver archives I do not know. The support team recommended that I contact Getac HQ in the USA. Getac USA advised me that there were no drivers available for the A770 on the support servers and that I was not in their support region. All the same, the kind chap forwarded my request to a helpful chap called Richard. Richard hunted for drivers and managed to come up with a few of the more tricky ones to source. I am very grateful to all the Getac staff involved in my request as they decided to help in spite of a likely company policy to say "Sorry End of Life and out of support" as some other companies declare.

It would have been so much easier for all concerned if Getac kept a Legacy product archive on their download page, as they used to do. FLIR have an extensive legacy documentation and software archive on their servers. They do not take up much room and can be invaluable. I can only assume Getac Marketing want legacy computers effectively killed off by a lack of support and drivers etc.

With regard to the A770, my investigations into its architecture revealed that it is a standard Centrino computer but built like a Tank. The fact that it contains a well known and supported chip set made life so much easier. The Intel Drivers provided the required support for many parts of the computers architecture but there were exceptions. I needed the Intel i855GM drivers and a few for specific components that I had identified via the PCI module Vendor and device Identity information I collected from the Win7 installation I originally put on for diagnostics.

The troublesome drivers were for Audio, Ethernet and the Modem (which I will not be using anyway) I needed the drivers to match the chips used and also to be compatible with XP without any service packs loaded. Some drivers demanded later service pack versions that I needed to avoid (I need the ieee1394 TCP-IP capability that was removed in later service packs). I also had the infamous usbehci.sys missing warning so no USB 2.0 support. I provided usbehi.sys and all was well, USB2.0 was provided.

Another way to go about this exercise is to dismantle the Laptop and identify each chip used for the relevant functions. I did not fancy that with this lovely virgin rugged laptop though. Lots of screws and complex internal physical architecture. I pursued the auto install of Win7 and PCI listing as a first step. As it turned out I managed to identify most of what was used in the laptop. I could not identify a specific Multimedia Audio or Modem chipset though. From my experience, Multimedia Audio Drivers can be a PITA on XP and you need the right one for all to work properly.

Well chuffed with the end result. This laptop oozes quality build and looks the dogs do-da's as a rugged portable computer   

Fraser

[ebastler]

Thanks for the background story, Fraser. So it boils down to one or two individuals at Getac who were willing to do the right thing and be helpful. Glad you found them!

[Fraser]

Another point I should make about theses rugged laptops..... they often have daylight readable LCD displays. The above pictures were taken in a sunny conservatory ! A touchscreen is also a common option.

Fraser

[Fraser]

As a follow-up to the A770 story I thought I would share my recent good fortune regarding a part used in it. A case of better born lucky than rich me thinks 

I was looking for an extra A770 hard disk caddy so that I could change operating systems to suit the computers tasking. Those familiar with Military spec laptops will know that the caddy's used in these computers are generally more complex than those of standard laptops. They often use non standard connectors and contain heater plates to keep the mechanical hard disk bearings warm in very low temperatures. This tends to mean that the caddy's for rugged laptops are both scarce and expensive. Many such caddy's retail at £50 to £150 each ! Not great when I just bought the whole 'as-new' laptop for less than £60.

I also needed some caddy's for my Ex Military Getac M230 laptops. They came without the hard disk (and sadly associated caddy) for obvious reasons. A HIROSE (HRS) high density D shaped connector is used on the caddy and I have discovered that this connector is now discontinued and unobtainium I was faced with 'hot wiring' a standard hard disk connector into the motherboard to circumvent the HRS connector or to pay around £80 for a used M230 Caddy on ebay. I need 8 of them !!!!
I could also fit a hard disk CD bay caddy at only £8 each but then I lose the DVD writer capability which would be a pity.

Back to the A770 caddy.......

My searches for the Caddy were at first fruitless and no one was offering any A760 or A770 caddy's either on eBay of via direct sale, at any price I did some lateral thinking and decided to use some different search search terms including the caddy's MITAC part number (GETAC was part of MITAC). Luck was on my side this time around. I got a hit on some caddy stock on a surplus sellers web site. Better still they were in the UK The price ? .... well this is where things got interesting.

The UK company listed the required complete empty caddy unit under its Mitac Description and again under just the part number. The first was priced at £7.50 each and the second at £3 each. I thought it likely that an error had been made in the stock listing or the second unit was not a complete assembly, likely just the outer shell with no 'guts'. I contacted the seller with some trepidation. I hoped to buy 10 caddy's at £3 each but if the seller identified an error they might cost me £7.50 each. The seller responded saying that the caddy's were burried in the warehouse and would take time to find. After a week of no word from the seller, I decided to buy 10 of the £3 caddy's and one of the £7.50 caddy's to see the difference and I thought it worth the risk. I would at least have one complete caddy for the A770. Postage was £7.50 and I submitted the order.

The same day I received a note from the seller explaining that they needed to check for stock availability. Oooops that did not sound promising He contacted me again the next day to explain that indeed an error had been made in all web entries for the caddy.... description, stock holding and price   He said he had 11 caddy's and was going to honor the £3 price on 10 and £7.50 on the one. Good man  He even gave me next day delivery at no extra cost.

The 11 caddy's arrived today and are complete, brand new in their packing 

Why did I buy 11 ? Well dear readers, the caddy is different to that used in the M230 laptop, but the connector used on it is the same on both models of laptop. That unobtainium connector is now mine for £3 each plus I have the basics of a caddy casing to convert to the needs of the M230 Hard Drive dock. I needed one extra caddy for the A770, eight for the M230's and two spares

I count myself as very lucky at the moment. Not only did I find the caddy for the A770, which is in itself rare, I also discovered that it uses the same connector as the M230, the seller had multiple units to sell and the seller honored an incorrect price for me. Happy days

As I said, sometimes it is better to be born lucky than rich (I would not mind trying rich some time though    )

Fraser

[Halcyon]

Thanks for the update Fraser! 

[Fraser]

You are most welcome.

Another development..... I thanked the seller for his kindness and he responded by telling me he has an A770 laptop in the warehouse if I was interested in it ! We shall see what develops on that front

Fraser

[Fraser]

Looks like I have just provided a good home for a Getac A320 and A760  Both are coming to me for the cost of postage from the Caddy seller He just wants them to go to a good home A true Gentleman 

They are even more deserving of appearance in this Vintage Computing sub forum than the A770 ! The two laptops look very similar to the A770 but inside those rugged casings a PIII 400MHz powerhouse of a CPU resides That combined with just 256K of RAM will make for an interesting challenge when it comes to assigning duties to these laptops in my lab. They are both licenced for Win98 but can run WinXP pretty well if some fine tuning is applied to the OS build to reduce processing overhead.

Both units are in great condition and I am glad to be saving them from an unknown fate, potentially the scrap bin !

Fraser

[SeanB]

Time to dabble in Linux Fraser, puppy Linux will run at blazing speed on that, and with 256k of RAM it will be more than adequate to run it as well.

[Fraser]

I used to use a lot of Linux based tools when I was a network compliance auditor. I still have Knoppix boot CD's and several other flavours of Linux. I shall have to have a play with them again  That will be a trip down memory lane as I stopped network accreditation duties 7 years ago 

Fraser

[pamperchu]

it has an internal heater, like for starting the battery and stuff in -50c weather?

[Fraser]

Yes, the heater acts on the hard disk to warm the lubrication in the bearings. Such is not an issue with a low temperature rated SSD these days though. The heater is just a simple insulated foil type with a thermistor monitoring the hard disk temperature.

From memory, I think the LCD panel also had foil heaters behind it as well.

Fraser

[pamperchu]

that disk drive connector looks like what SGI/SUN used for removable SCSI drives. it might let you shove in a 3.5" SCSI drive w/o any adapters

[Fraser]

Hi,

It is a Hirose (HRS) high density connector that is now discontinued.
I checked the various similar connectors including SCSI etc. No Dice. Even when available the connectors were very expensive. I could find no connector types that had the correct spacing and shell shape.

Fraser