Toshiba NB500 Owner's Lounge

I've picked up a toshiba nb500 yesterday for $363AU. It's a nice little netbook so I thought it deserved it's own thread.

The box didn't come with much, just the AC/DC adapter, the user guide and a few other papers.

I have upgraded the stock HDD to a SSD, really easy to do since you can get quick access to the drive after removing 2 screws on the bottom of the netbook. This also gives you access to the ram and wifi card.


1gb is really not enough these days, so I took out the original hynix 800mhz 1gb stick of "eco" ram and replaced it with a 2gb stick of 800mhz samsung ddr2 ram. Sisoftwares sandra reported that the system would support a 4gb stick, but I didn't have one to try. The Ram runs at 667mhz in this netbook.

The wifi in this thing is a realtek RTL8188CE minipcie card. Just for fun I tried swapping it with an intel 5100 wifi card. Driver installed fine, but I could not turn the wifi on. Could be something toshiba did intentionally, would require some work to fix. Not something I'm going to bother with since I can only find one reason to use an intel card.

kizwan has modified the bios, you can see the screenshots and download it here:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/ace...ix-bios-bios-mod-request-175.html#post7207747

You can flash the bios with Winphlash1656:
ftp://ftp.gateway.com/pub/hardware_support/drivers/win_vista/bios/Winphlash1656.exe

As far as overclocking goes, I'm not really optimistic that it would be possible without a pinmod. I have not taken the netbook apart yet so I am not sure about what PLL it uses, but most PLLs are very similar and when bit 6 of byte 9 is 1, it's usually a bad sign.

Setfsb diag screen:



I'm a little disappointed with the battery life, getting just over 4 hours while lightly browsing the internet. I have the 3 cell battery, would be worth getting a 6 cell if possible.

CPU temp is usually between 40C and 60C. The fan does go off sometimes, but most of the time it's on.

Looks like some of these may have an extra miniPCIe slot because I can see the pads where one could be soldered but the connector is missing.
Same goes for the sim card slot.

If anyone is interested, I believe the motherboard is made by compal (because "compal confidention" is written all over a pdf doc that comes with the oldest bios that you can download on the toshiba drivers site):
Download drivers:

For the nb500 select:
Notebook > toshiba > toshiba NB series > NB500.

I have found a site that contains some good info on the NB200/250/300:
Index of /laptops/toshiba
I'll be keeping an eye on that for the nb500 docs (if they become available).

 

The latest bios has been modded, download link is in the first post.

I've also been able to run the vbios from a desktop 3150 in dos, could not get into windows though. I was hoping this would double my GPU frequency, still working on it.

 

Looks good Moral; and Congrats on your new netbook!

Keep us updated with any progress.

 

Thanks

Good news, found the PLL (while taking apart the netbook to change the thermal paste, the pll is rtm890n-397):
http://forum.notebookreview.com/har...clocking-methods-examples-90.html#post7225440


Also kizwan has made a new bios, this one has vbios from the desktop intel 3150 GPU. It works, but there is no reason to use it because the GPU clock didn't change to 400mhz. No extra performance and the image on the screen is cut off a bit at the bottom.
http://forum.notebookreview.com/ace...ix-bios-bios-mod-request-178.html#post7225774

 

Is Toshiba one of the brands that does not offer service manuals for owners? I can't find any for a Toshiba NB200-10G at least.

 

Have you seen this:
http://tim.id.au/laptops/toshiba/nb200.pdf

If you're looking for the schematics, I think this might be it:
TOSHIBA NB200 NB205 KAVAA REV 1.0