lloydwood | Entries tagged with laptop

In December 2009 I bought a Toshiba Satellite L500-PZ laptop. Having 'Satellite' in the name was cool, but incidental. I needed a machine running Microsoft Office, and it came with Office 2007. The thing is heavy and plasticky, including a too-small off-centre touchpad.

Toshiba Satellite laptop with TOSHIBA covered by ++ungood; sticker

My requirements to be useful were minimum 4GB RAM, minimum 1366x768 display, and it had those. Could be expanded to 8GB, though I didn't bother. Full keyboard with numeric pad, DVD drive, two USB 2.0 ports, Ethernet and 802.11b Wifi, SD memory card slot, VGA and HDMI, 3.5mm headphone out and microphone in. A camera above the screen when that was still novel, so they printed 'Web camera' next to it. A Core 2 Duo processor, which was 64-bit, so an attempt at futureproofing, but this was early in the 64-bit days, and some 64-bit features (HyperV) weren't supported -- so I couldn't run 64-bit VirtualBox VMs, but I could eventually run 64-bit Cygwin. Mobile Intel 4 Express chipset integrated graphics, which eventually turned into a limiting factor. Windows 7, and it gained a free upgrade to Windows 10 eventually - so that part of the futureproofing plan worked out okay.

The LCD screen wasn't great - washed out, poor colour gamut, and with a single stuck pixel luckily normally hidden in the taskbar; you could only return it with five or more dead pixels.

Thermals were poor, and cooling was ineffective; after a few years, it would occasionally decide it was too hot, and just promptly shut itself down without warning. Moving to Australia did not help with that. Throttling CPU speed was explored, but there wasn't much speed to throttle. When used to stream video, I sat it on a thick plastic coathanger to raise it and increase airflow, but that didn't help much. The battery was replaced, but the replacement battery died when I forgot about thermals and used the laptop on a duvet, which heated the cells to death.

Still works sans a battery, still gets Windows 10 updates (but not manufacturer updates via Toshiba Service Station or its latest replacement), but stutters and heats up when playing video, because the graphics chipset did not include hardware decode of newer codecs - and decoding video in software just added to the load and to the heat.

It's now of very little use.

Toshiba is no longer in the laptop business, and their Satellite production has been taken over by DynaBook, who produce their own Service Station. There's still some support - in February 2024 they issued a power adapter recall affecting me.

My video streaming is now taken care of by one of my three Ollees.

This is a placeholder for growing notes on my Intel NUC M15 laptop, model LAPBC710, launched Q4 2020, bought June 2022. There are two variants of this: Intel i5 processor, 8GB RAM, no touchscreen, and faster i7, 16GB RAM, with a touchscreen. I bought the i7. 11th generation processor; I'm told the more expensive 12th generation (LAPRC710/510) has poorer battery life. 512GB NVMe M.2 drive on this model, Intel Iris XE integrated graphics.

The screen can lie 180 degrees flat -- needed for touch. Folding back behind the keyboard and pretending to be a tablet isn't worth it. The M15's full HD 1920x1080 display is pretty standard at this point in 2023. Could be higher, especially if it wasn't touch, but does it really matter? The serviceable camera above the screen was criticised in reviews, and probably could have been better given that the screen lid is over 4mm thick. Two USB-A ports, two chargeable USB-C ports, one of each on each side, HDMI and 3.5mm headphone jack.

The M15 hardware is robust, and resembles a modern MacBook Pro, the template for many laptops. (The software, though...) Like the Blackbook of old, there's an all-black variant -- but that black will scratch to reveal the aluminium beneath, the black keys are less distinguishable, and it will soak up the sun more in Australia.

Necessary links:

Model support information.
latest driver updates (February 2024 v4.0, 1.7 GB package. Installing these shows the limits of the whole Wintel experience.)
Intel Software Studio, which controls locking the screen and going to sleep if it decides you're not there, but kept deciding I wasn't there. Fixed in those latest drivers, apparently. This overblown control panel is also in the Microsoft Store.
that lock-and-sleep problem I ran into. An earlier description and advice.
But installing all of those drivers I had to download, instead of just the two I needed, to fix one problem introduced another -- the microphone stopped working. Described in this thread, and eventually a support page, which is inaccurate and of little help.
Intel Driver and Support Assistant -- covers Iris XE, but is not that NUC-specific.

I haven't installed or played with the Alexa Assistant to make the light bar at the front under the touchpad light up. I thought that was the only real gimmick on this, apart from their take on presence detection -- but the Intel SmartArray microphone now appears gimmicky, too.

As Intel intended the NUC range to be rebranded by others, which is why the M15 is sold as a 'laptop kit,' it lacks visible branding apart from a small Intel evo hologram sticker below the keyboard and technical data on the underside of the case -- the lack of branding gimmickry is a nice touch, at least. evo seems to be an Intel marketing push now that they've stopped trying to push Ultrabooks.

I'm not too fussed about first-person games or blockchains, but I did not anticipate high-end graphics' use in Artificial Intelligence: rendering (such as Midjourney) and Large Language Models (LLMs: ChatGPT and the like). Still, it will be a while before those run well on laptop GPUs.

There's a flashier, plasticky, different NUC X15 model with a higher-resolution screen and a range of dedicated graphics cards, but that's prone to overheating. This M15 is probably the best that Intel can offer in terms of quality -- and better than the revised model with the later 12th generation processor. I've heard informally that M15s with 12th generation Intel processors run hot with fans whirring, presumably because the new processor, with a more demanding thermal envelope, was placed into a case and cooling designed around the attributes of the 11th generation and its lesser Thermal Design Power requirements. The 11th generation i7-1165G7 processor has a minimum power draw of 12W, while the 12th generation i7-1260P processor draws 20W and has a comparable base power of 28W -- more than twice as much. The TDP-up of the 11th gen is also 28W, so if thermals were designed for 11th gen, 12th gen pushes them.It's the cooling problem of beefy Intel processors in sleek cases that plagued Apple and its MacBooks for years. (12th-generation Intel processors are split into P or lower-power U processors, which have less battery draw and better cooling needs.)

I bought the M15 after a disastrous experience with a similarly-specified Lenovo Yoga 7i evo foldable whose fans kept whirring even when it was asleep, and which suffered multiple support calls from the Philippines to try to install drivers to fix it, before it was eventually fully refunded. But driver problems -- and cooling problems -- seem endemic to Intel laptops. These evo laptops are not good. Contrary to early claims to the contrary, they definitely do suck.

My M15 came with Windows 10, and, after experiencing 11 on the Yoga, I haven't upgraded. I'll stick with Windows 10 for as long as possible. This required a workaround to remove a license dialog that can't be backed out of, so that I could continue to get Windows 10 updates. But as soon as I pressed Update, it started downloading Windows 11 again. sigh. Here's how to prevent Windows 11 at all costs.

In July 2023 Intel announced that they were exiting the NUC business and support for the NUC mini PCs has transitioned to ASUS. Support for the NUC laptops appears to have vanished -- ASUS already has laptops. Next Unit of Computing? Ha.

In late 2007 I bought a black MacBook 3,1. (Or 'blackBook'. Older '90s Powerbooks are dark grey, really.) I still have it.

That MacBook has an Intel Core2Duo processor. 1280x800 screen resolution. 4GB memory in slots (6 is possible), replaceable 3.5" hard drive and battery. A DVD Superdrive, long unused. First-generation Magsafe power. The neat modular, user-upgradable, design attracted me - I've replaced memory (was 1GB), hard drive (now 1TB), the power supply, and batteries. So many batteries. But current software and browsers won't run on its old OS, even though it has the then-new App Store. It is limited to no later than MacOS 10.7 by Apple OS releases. 10.7 expects flash performance for virtual memory, so Snow Leopard 10.6 is the better, more responsive, choice.

The blackBook's black polycarbonate case ages far better than white, which fades and yellows after a couple of years. Apple charged extra for that black colour, with a slightly larger (120GB) hard drive. No keyboard backlight, though. Black keys against a black case, but key legends have held up well.

On these models, the palmrest tends to crack at the case edges, where the two nub ridges from the top of the screen lid rest - I prevented that early by buying a stick-on palm cushion, with cutouts around the nubs, that increases contact area and spreads the pressure, while outlining where the black-on-black touchpad ends. And my MacBook is in pristine condition, because it's always lived in a clear polycarbonate shell. These things were expensive and fragile, so you spent a little extra to protect the investment.

But a black plastic laptop? In the hot Australian sun? Think again. Once Apple moved to aluminium cases and then to black screen surrounds as less distracting, utility won out, and other manufacturers followed suit. You can now buy an all-black Intel NUC M15 laptop, but I thought of the sun and wanting to see the key edges and bought the grey, naked aluminium, M15 with black screen surround instead.

On batteries: the original battery eventually started swelling, at the same time the power supply died. Went to an Apple Store, and was told by a Genius that 'all batteries swell at end of life'. Asked him what that meant for newer Apple laptops, where batteries could not be easily removed. No answer. Still, I was given a free replacement power supply, and later found a replacement battery online for half Apple's price.

Transferring data off the MacBook meant making it read and write NTFS drives with a software utility - I bought Tuxera to copy everything slowly to a USB drive.

I've replaced the blackBook with white Ollee snowbooks these days.

Ollee laptop sales

In November 2021, I bought a reduced-price Ollee laptop from Harvey Norman in Australia in a Black Friday sale, for under AU$250. Model L116HTN65PW. 4GB memory, and with a small, but relatively high-resolution, 11.6" 1920x1080 Full HD screen. This laptop -- or netbook? -- has an ice-white case, so some informally call it a 'snowbook'. It's an upgrade to my Asus F102BA of yore after seven years.

Ollee seems to be a house brand of the Harvey Norman department store, distinct from the Australian Ollee that sells macrame laptop sleeves. This laptop appears be built in China, may be similar to an Acer model, but designed in New Zealand, and there have been previous iterations (typically Atom processors, with 2GB and, later, 4GB of memory). There is little model or support information on the web.

Size

The Ollee weighs 1kg, with dimensions of 284mm x 194mm x 16mm at its thickest point. It's very portable.

Interfaces and ports

There's no touch screen, but then the Windows touch interface and experience are quite poor, especially on a hinged screen that can't lie flat, so that's no great loss. There are Bluetooth 4.2 and recent dual-band 802.11ac WiFi. Alongside two USB-A 3.0 ports, the included micro SD card slot and mini HDMI port could be useful. And there are 3.5mm headphone and coax power jacks.

Most interesting - and why it's worth buying - is the empty 80mm bay underneath that can contain a solid-state M.2 drive, which specifications don't even mention - packaging doesn't call this out in the product description on the box, so it doesn't make it into adverts, and the brief manual only mentions 'SSD COVER' in an outline diagram. The best selling point of this laptop is not described and is undersold. More on using that bay later.

Comparable alternatives

Alternatives which also include an externally accessible M.2 bay:

The larger, slightly more expensive, 14.1"-screen L141HTN6SPW sister snowbook model has the same keyboard, physical ports and processor, but a slightly physically bigger, but lower-resolution, 1366x768 screen on a flimsier hinge, with older wireless and only one USB 3.0 port - the other is the much slower USB 2.0. As an older design, it's nowhere near as good value.

A similar model, same case and indicators, older interfaces just like the bigger snowbook, but different colouring, similar slightly cheaper price, is the Kogan Atlas L700, coming with Windows Pro instead of S/Home. Kogan bought the Dick Smith brand when that store collapsed, so this is another in-house product.

M.2 use is growing, with support in a number of higher-end laptops.

(Laptops which may only have an internal M.2 connector, and which may or may not have support for it soldered on, are more trouble than they're worth to open up to try to use. Lenovo IdeaPad, I'm looking at you.)

Processor

This Ollee's previous-generation N3350 Celeron processor, launched 2016, is not powerful - from low to high performance, these days it's Intel Atom, then Celeron, Pentium silver and gold, core M, i3, i5, i7 and i9 (with a range of AMD Ryzen equivalents), then Apple's M1. The Ollee appears to be fanless and silent, with passive cooling via a heatsink. So, it won't heat up much, because it's just not that speedy. The snowbook is a slowbook.

This Celeron processor supports up to 8 GB of RAM, so only having four is a little disappointing

The integrated graphics uses Intel HD Graphics 500.

The Ollee has a TPM 2.0 module, but the Celeron N3350 processor is a generation too old for official Windows 11 support at this time. However, the models I saw in the store were running Window 11, while also showing older 1366x768 displays, so unofficial unsupported installs of Windows 11 may be possible -- and getting the better-than-expected display in the delivered laptop was a nice surprise.

Storage

The included 64GB eMMC flash onboard is just large enough to allow Windows to update itself (32GB, as used on older models, is no longer enough for Windows 10 to perform big updates easily, and after all updates I see 20GB of delivery files for Disk Cleanup to delete). It's easy enough to switch from Windows S to the full Windows 10.

The saving grace that attracted me: there's an 80mm M.2 2280 SSD slot on the underside. By adding a bargain solid state drive in a cheap upgrade, a useful cheap laptop is achieved. By formatting the SSD if needed with Windows Disk Management and switching the faster SSD to C: by cloning the internal drive onto it and setting the new SSD as the bootable startup drive in BIOS, everything is sped up.

Caveats: Buying the right M.2 SSD is tricky; you want low-end SATA for the Ollee, and I've found that 512GB works. M.2 connectors have many variants, but most SATA drives should fit - look at the slot to determine type. If you buy the wrong type of drive, you can always buy a USB cradle that handles any M.2 SSD, and format the SSD for use as an external drive. Western Digital Blue is higher performing than Green, and their SSD Dashboard tool is useful for erasing the SSD and starting over when you can't get partitions right. 512GB SATA for $80 is cheap compared to what flash storage costs when built into a laptop. Apple, I'm looking at you.

Extending the size of the C:\ partition when you clone the eMMC to SSD can be done with Macrium Reflect Home, which you can download for a 30-day trial. Take care when entering the license key you were emailed; unclick the '30 day trial' box, enter the key, click the box again. A tutorial on cloning the system disk with Macrium is available. I found that Macrium automatically offered to extend the 'right' system partition. (There are a large number of 'free' partition managers that require payment to enable cloning a system partition and what should be now considered basic disk management features. It's an exploitative market. Cloning was a feature of Macrium Reflect Free 7, but was removed from Macrium Reflect Free version 8, which has a poorer user interface, so now you need the newly added intermediate Home edition. You can only run the Macrium trial once, as it messes with the registry -- and that no-trial-allowed feature is inherited by the registry on all boot partitions you clone. If you need the capability, AOMEI Partition Assistant may be better value.)

The Prixton BIOS (American Megatrends Aptio interface) can be entered into on startup by pressing Esc on the top left of the keyboard, or Delete on the right, to change boot settings and switch between drives where Windows Boot Manager is available. (The internal eMMC can be left as a bootable backup/recovery drive, which makes more sense than having a restore partition on a working drive that fails, or than using the eMMC as a slow and soon-to-wear-out working drive.)

Kogan M.2 SSD bays are similar.

Minor things noted

On unboxing, removing the screen protector branded with an Ollee logo is always the most difficult part, as its pulltab tears off. If there had been no printed logo, I would simply have left that thick transparent protector in place. I noticed the clear thin plastic protector stuck over the camera about a month later.

At high screen brightness when the display is all one colour, say, light blue, I saw a slightly brighter ring from the backlight on one model, but that's otherwise barely noticeable. (Don't put heavy objects on a plastic laptop is always good advice.)

The DC transformer integrates an Aussie plug and plastic flanges to ensure space for cooling, making it inconveniently wide for extension blocks. The DC power jack receptacle is of similar diameter to the headphone jack, so it's easy to plug into the wrong port. The power jack is also shorter than the plug, which comes out easily - no MagSafe needed here! The sloped case sides don't help with that or other ports, but USB-A works fine.

Speaking of USB-A, accidentally trying to plug Mini-HDMI into USB-A can bluescreen and reset the laptop. Since USB-C is smaller, it won't have that problem.

On first Windows setup, it's far easier and faster not to give a wifi password, so the setup completes without "Just a minute..." stalling trying to download and install new versions of Windows 10. Add wifi later, add your Microsoft account later when you switch from S to Home, and then let it do the many many Windows updates in the background while using the laptop. (If setup hangs or stalls on updates, doing hard power resets three times in a row while on the Ollee logo with a spinning wait icon, which acts as the Windows logo for this manufacturer-installed Windows, should get you to the reset screen where you can get a do-over.)

Windows estimates the battery life at... two hours? Not great, even for an inaccurate estimator of a never-discharged battery. Running a battery health report with powercfg /batteryreport reports a relatively small Li-ion battery of 29,600 mWh.

Windows thoughts

Disabling Microsoft Edge's Startup boost speeds startup and saves memory... particularly when you don't use Edge. If you do use Edge, look into settings for sleeping unused tabs.

Buy the cheap Microsoft HEVC Video Extensions pack from the App Store, for watching movies. You'll be glad you did - it plays back more smoothly than open-source alternatives, and adds capabilities to the Films & TV app and elsewhere. Install it on all your Windows machines. This should really be included in Windows.

Finally

Hopefully, the Ollee will serve well as a travel netbook for light use. After all, at just over 1kg it's as light as the 2015 11.6" Macbook Air it resembles. Odd that I can't find this product in HN stores outside Australia - not even New Zealand.

On Christmas Day 2021 Harvey Norman had this laptop model on sale again, for AU$40 less than I had paid for it. 198 dollars? That's value. Reader, I bought a second one. (That offer and the laptop vanished three weeks later on 15 January. The poorer, larger, sister model was still available.)

two Ollee snowbook laptops or netbooks, side by side

Those are cheap and light: down to $99 second-hand, plus another hundred to add a 1TB M.2 flash drive, and at that price, who cares how much a snowbook case yellows or how long it lasts? Reader, I bought a third one, and put a terabyte M.2 drive in it.

In April 2014 I bought an ASUS X102BA laptop cheaply from the Dick Smith store, back before that retail chain went out of business and was bought by Kogan. (The X102BA is also known as the F102BA; X has 2 GB memory, F has 4 GB -- soldered, non-upgradeable. Their bigger, faster, brother is the X200CA/F200CA.)

ASUS X102BA laptop reinstalling Windows 10 Home from USB

My F102BA had some promise as a netbook: 4GB RAM, which is a useful minimum for Windows these days, a full touchscreen which could be used to experiment with Windows 8, and a decent number of ports. No Bluetooth on my machine, but that's no great loss. Microsoft Office Home 2013 included. Not much speed and a slightly cramped keyboard, but at a good price.

I soon learned that Windows 8.1 was painful to use, and even had to use regedit to get the Windows Store to work. The 64-bit AMD A4 processor was fairly slow, the hard drive even slower. The touchscreen was not easy to use; the Windows interface simply doesn't handle touch well, and Apple is right about touch not being workable for an upright hinged screen. (A lower angle and rear support are needed.) The laptop didn't get that much use, even after I put a 32 GB flash card in its SD slot for ReadyBoost to speed up the many slow disk accesses.

A couple of years later, my F102BA had been upgraded to Windows 10 Home for free, as it just met the operating system's minimum threshold of 1 GHz processor speed. (But, with an AMD processor, 1 GHz is more like... 800 MHz Intel? The AMD A4-1200 has sub-Atom performance, anyway. But, for a cheap netbook, the integrated graphics are good - for playing games from 2003 or so.)

Hard disk problems

Windows updates began failing with odd status errors. In trying to fix that, I found myself reinstalling the Windows operating system a couple of times.

The December 2017 version of Windows 10 Home warned about a disk partition that was soon to fail, but did let me install Windows on it. The laptop was very slow, and getting slower. When Windows takes over two days to install, there might be a drive issue - though, no SMART errors were reported on the 320 GB 5400 rpm HGST drive, which probably doesn't support SMART. Windows 10 Home version 1803 later refused to install on that drive at all. I have questions about the reliability of that drive model Z5K500-320. I'd like to know why the hard drive is slow and warned about but not yet showing data loss or SMART errors. Still works, but sooo slow. (and I'm not alone in slow X102BA Windows installs.)

Yet I then installed Ubuntu 18 on the same hard drive, oddly far more quickly. Ubuntu would also warn about impending drive failure on each startup, though. And the laptop would always shut down, instead of sleeping, when put to sleep, or even if its lid was closed.

So, I bought a SanDisk internal 2.5" solid-state drive, and replaced the HGST drive with that. (There are five P0 screws to remove from the bottom plastic case, one under the peel-back label, two under the rear feet. There are tutorials on YouTube.) Windows 10 Home version 1803 installed rapidly on the SSD, and Windows updates then installed just as they should.

With the necessary SSD drive in place, it's working as it should, but far faster than before, and the SD card slot is free for use, as ReadyBoost is no longer needed.

Fixing sleep issues

The laptop began to always shutdown instead of sleeping. Since this happened under both Ubuntu and Windows, it was clearly a BIOS, rather than an OS, issue.

Pressing F2 on startup to enter the American Megatrends firmware showed that to be rather sparse in settings; nothing could be tweaked to fix the shutdown problem. The way to fix not being able to sleep is, according to web lore, to reflash the BIOS entirely. This is a series of non-obvious and non-documented steps that will do just that.

Download the latest BIOS from the ASUS X102BA Support page: Regular visitors and long-time X102BA/F102BA users may notice the emptiness of that page and how most of the ASUS drivers and packages have been deleted as if they never were. This page can fail silently with cookie blocking; do try fiddling with browser extensions if you cannot see any drivers to download. The number of Google and Facebook trackers is appalling. At one point Chrome on another laptop could see the drivers, while an identical install of Chrome on the X102BA could not. You may have to try different web browsers as well.
Find and download WinFlash to reflash the BIOS: Finding WinFlash is a difficult hunt through ASUS support pages. There's a version 2.3 and a later 3.01; either will do. But when you run the WinFlash installer, it will refuse to install WinFlash, because it believes that the X102BA is not an ASUS computer.
Find and download the ASUS ATK hotkey utility for function key functionality: It turns out that ASUS WinFlash installer looks for ASUS ATK, and won't install unless ATK is present. This is non-obvious and undocumented; you can wind up searching for this and then cherry-picking other useful drivers on the support pages of more recent ASUS laptops, working through a variety of model serial numbers with the ASUS search tool.

If you can see the ATK download on the X102BA page, it's of 1.0.0039 - yet later versions such as 1.0.0056 are available from other ASUS download pages. That also holds for other drivers, such as SmartGesture; finding each driver's latest version is a treasure hunt.
Install and run WinFlash with a special hidden command-line flag: Once you can run WinFlash, you can then reflash the BIOS - except you can't, because you can only refresh with a later BIOS, and if you already have the latest BIOS installed, the Winflash Flash button is disabled. It's an especially idiotic kind of idiot-proofing. You'll need to open a cmd window and type e.g.:
cd "\Program Files (x86)\ASUS\WinFlash8" WinFlash.exe /nodate
At that point the Flash button is now enabled and can be pressed. Flashing begins once you Exit the application, which shuts the laptop down. Reflashing the latest BIOS with another copy of the latest BIOS is sufficient to fix the sleep issue.

Voila, a laptop that can sleep again!

(I found myself repeating reflashing in mid-2022; the rightmost LED, for power, was flickering green/orange, indicating that the battery was at less than 10%, according to the manual. Reflashing to the same BIOS version reset non-volatile settings, and removed the flickering.)

Now, none of this is documented by ASUS, despite reflashing to fix sleep problems apparently being common across many ASUS machines, given the number of unresolved complaints about the issue that I've read around the web in researching this. This is all incredibly non-obvious, and I had to learn it slow step by step from hints in answers to questions across the web - including finally learning of /nodate from a deleted webpage. Even if you wondered whether a single-use GUI application had any useful command-line switches, Winflash.exe /? tells you nothing.

ASUS really needs to work on its support and documentation, and must make its drivers easier to obtain. Forcing deliberate obsolescence through deliberately hiding information isn't going to make me want to buy ASUS again. That is neglect, and it is not benign.

(It's also possible to install the AMD Catalyst Control Center and AMD graphics driver to give more control over 3D rendering, OpenGL buffering, and the like on the integrated graphics. You can't increase performance with the Catalyst Control Center, but you could choose to slow the processor clock.)

Battery replacement

After around five years of intermittent use, the F102BA battery would no longer charge, and the rightmost LED for charging would flash constantly while the laptop was powered. Replacing the battery requires opening the case and removing one more P0 screw holding the battery to the motherboard, before lifting the battery out. The replacement battery could then be dropped in over the terminals marked + and -. Chinese third-party batteries are a third of the cost, but generally don't last as long; given the effort in opening the case, they're a false economy. It's not something that you would want to do again soon.

Wireless issues

In 2021, the laptop began losing Wi-Fi connectivity while running on battery -- requiring a hard power cycle, not just a restart, to recover it. This appeared to be due to current Windows 10 now putting the Qualcomm Atheros AR9485WB-EG adapter to sleep, but not re-enabling it properly; the adapter hardware would just vanish when viewed in ipconfig /all, presumably because it was shutdown instead of sleeping. Unsetting the checkbox in the wireless adapter properties to not have it sleep fixed this.

(Device Manager, Adapter Properties, Power Management,
[] Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power)

Replacing that Wi-Fi Mini PCI-E card with another (Intel, say) could increase Wi-Fi bands (adding 5GHz) and speeds and add Bluetooth support, though there's only a single integral antenna cabled as is.

Secure boot

Pressing F2 on startup to enter the firmware (well, UEFI) can allow CSM (the BIOS Compatibility Support Module) to be enabled and disabled to support Linux and other operating systems.

In the Security menu, admin and user passwords can be set, and then saved with F10 to save settings. Passwords can be removed by entering the current password, then just pressing Enter at the new password to clear each password -- then F10 to save settings.

A TPM Trusted Platform module is not mentioned in the firmware settings, and does not appear to be supported. This may be an issue for the forthcoming Windows 11, which requires TPM 2.0. Still, getting a few years of Windows 10 support was unexpected.

Still of limited use

This laptop is still getting all current Windows 10 updates, and can run some virtual machines and the Windows Linux subsystem... but it's still slow. Pausing a VirtualBox machine that is not being used is essential.

My F102BA has been a useful backup, good for occasional editing, and a relatively cheap introduction to using Windows 10. It may last a long time, and spare parts are available.

But now, in 2023, the battery has died, again, and it reboots occasionally even when powered, it's not cost-effective to buy another battery when I can just use a faster, more comfortable, Ollee laptop.