semi rugged CF-Y7 my journey

i bought this laptop from ebay - a company called cyber japan after a little negotiation they offered to give me 100USD off their price if i pay using google checkout. since they had good feedback i decided to go through that route. total 1,689.00USD. they also guarentee no customs fees cause they route all deliveries through one of their offices in california (still the parcel i received seem to have come straight from japan - oh well )

ordered on the 20th december and received on the 2nd jan - this is expected with the holidays. the whole package is light .. including the box - i couldnt help bounce it up and down its just too light to be true. everything was nicely packed. did i say its light ? 1.5KG wow its lighter than my dell m1210 which is only 12"

it arrived with a Japanese version of Vista business and i installed a pirated copy of vista just to get hold of the drivers. after this step the drivers should be available in folder called util on the C drive copied them over and started to install XP

XP couldnt find any harddrives - i needed the Sata drivers for it, therfore i got a USB floppy drive and copied all the files needed (using a little online help) and started again.

XP saw the drivers. yay !! but wait - after recodnizing and loading everything else it still asked for the drivers which didnt quite make sense. i knew the file was available in the floppy disk but still it refused to see it. anyways the only way to get around is to integrate these drivers onto the XP installation i got. nlite to the rescue

after this is done i`ll try installing the vista drivers on xp. hopefully they will all work. also need to install a 200Gig 7.2k RPM hardrive from my dell m1210. and also upgrade the ram

just to confirm. even though advertised as having 1GB it comes with 512 soldered and 512 Upgradeable. more expensive models will have the 1GB soldered option. sniff sniff. maximum is 1.5GB for me i guess.