Overview of the domestic laptop iRU Brava-4215COMBO, released in 2004 (Part 1)

As unnecessary, this laptop was given to the parents of his wife a few years ago. Yes, despite the venerable age of 12 years, until recently it was used for its intended purpose. A couple of weeks ago, my parents asked him to bring him to life a bit, as he began to load for a very long time, make loud noises with coolers and demand care and attention in every way.

When created in 2004, the laptop had the following characteristics: Pentium 4 2800 MHz processor, 512 MB of DDR RAM, 60 GB hard drive, NVidia GeForce FX 5250 Go (NV34) video card, 15 ”SXGA display + 1400x1050 pixels. Once again, the screen resolution of this twelve-year-old laptop is 1400x1050, and my working laptop, on which I am writing these lines, has a resolution of “only” 1366x768 pixels!

Installed OS: Windows XP Home. Included was a briefcase for carrying a laptop with a bunch of protective soft pads.
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iRU Brava-4215COMBO has Realtek AC97 sound system, Agere Systems 56400 Kbit / s modem, Realtek 10/100 Mb / s Ethernet network card, MultiMedia Card reader, Secure Digital, Memory Stick, 4 USB 2.0 ports, IrDA 1.1 infrared port, optical DVD + CDRW drive.

The laptop manufacturer is a domestic iRU company still existing in the market. There is a proud inscription “Made in Russia” on the case, how many percent it is true, I don’t presume to judge.

A few years ago, I had already slightly upgraded the old man, put two gigabytes of RAM, changed the additional fan, and changed the optical drive. Trying to restore the long-dead batteries meaningless exercise, as the parents of the laptop is not transferred anywhere and calmly fed from the outlet.

Brava-4215COMBO had 4 built-in USB ports (yes, 4, I now have 3), but they were burned out, since the laptop and the device connected to it via USB were powered from different phases of the power supply. I will write about solving the problem below, but now it's time to finally see iRU Brava-4215COMBO in all its glory.

On the left side of the notebook are two PC Card slots (2xPCMCIA type I / II (5V / 3.3V) or 1 x PCMCIA type III), optical drive, MultiMedia Card reader, Secure Digital, Memory Stick, iLink (IEEE-1394), Infrared IrDA 1.1 port, left speaker. On the right side of the notebook is nothing interesting, cooling holes and the right speaker:



The laptop behind is very interesting, visible work of engineers, not defective managers: the laptop already has a modern and relatively standard 19 volt power connector (my laptop has exactly the same one), a parallel port (LPT), an output to an S-Video TV, an external monitor connector , 4 dead USB ports, RJ45 LAN connector, telephone line connector (dial-up modem) RJ11, 3.5 "line-out connectors combined with SPDIF, line-in connectors combined with microphone:



The idea of ​​putting the battery in front of the laptop, and bringing all the communication back, is simply gorgeous. No wires to you, nothing interferes. My Asus laptop has defective developers made a power connector on the left, approximately in the area of ​​the shift and control, and my wire is always plugged, damn, how it freezes me, constantly being in sight! And closer to the front edge on my laptop are still network connectors, monitor, HDMI, USB, that is, there is something to connect there, as it will look awful and interfere, as I constantly hanging arm from the bottom left edge of the laptop.

But it’s time to return to a more interesting instance of engineering, with a fast and easy access to the RAM and modem from the bottom of the iRU laptop:



Next to the modem, we see information about the laptop, release date, pay attention to the service life of 6 years, for a laptop, I think this is very decent, especially since the service life is already exceeded 2 times:



RAM slots are standard, two DDR strips per gigabyte are stuck in them:



After removing the battery, we get access to the hard drive, in order to remove it, you do not need to unscrew any screws; you just need to pull the hard drive by the standard tongue. How well I can’t say, on the one hand, to quickly remove the hard drive to overtake the data is convenient, on the other hand it is not very safe when you can remove the hard drive in 5 seconds from the laptop:



Finding the battery in front of the notebook gives another advantage: the front of the notebook becomes quite heavy and you can safely open the lid of the notebook with one hand. Now there are a lot of modern and light notebooks, which have loops stronger than the weight of the bottom of the notebook and such laptops can be opened only with two hands, holding the bottom part with one hand.

Now is the time to open the lid of the laptop:



The hinges have already been loosened a little and the screen is fixed in positions approximately every 5 degrees, in the remaining positions it is reeling.

The laptop has a very comfortable keyboard, with such a pleasant click, a cross between modern rubber keyboards and old spring keyboards, it is a pleasure to use. The inscriptions on the translucent buttons are almost not erased.

The touchpad seemed to me a little small, but it works clearly, smoothly, without jerks. The touchpad buttons are on the contrary hypertrophied, but I don’t recall duplication of the cursor buttons in the touchpad area on any other laptop.

I already realized that you were interested in unusual buttons from above, now I will show you closer:



At the top there is nothing interesting, the power button, mail, browser, TV output, screen switching, the IR port button.

The most unusual and interesting is located just below, it is the management of a music CD player. On the old optical drive, you could listen to audio discs without turning on the laptop, just pull the right button, put the audio CD and go. There is a volume control, rewind tracks forward / backward, stop, track indicator, play / pause, power. This I have never seen anywhere.

The screen itself is large, matte, not glare, 5: 4 aspect ratio. If I had photographed a glossy screen just with a flash "in the forehead," the whole glossy screen would be illuminated. The lack of a camera is not quite familiar. The silver frame is nowhere pokotsali, painting uniform, without scuffing. Rubber seals in place. Again, on my current laptop, the frame for some reason is made glossy and looks as if I work it out with sandpaper from time to time, well, and the gum falls out.



Indicators are displayed on the monitor and always before the eyes. Think LEDs? And here and there, the most real lamp lamps!



And here is the promised solution to the problem of dead USB ports, besides this, I got a card for connecting a laptop to Wi-Fi! The network is inserted into the lower PCMCIA slot, USB is inserted into the upper slot, both cards fit and do not interfere with each other, the Wi-Fi card is slightly longer, the light indication of work is just visible:



The laptop is powered by a standard and widespread in our time power supply with the appropriate connector, suitable for my other three laptops:



Brava-4215COMBO starts for a very long time, if you disconnect it from the power supply, it loses all the BIOS settings. It's time to disassemble the laptop a little and put it in order. Yes, I already hear your exclamation "Did he really guess !?".

To get to the battery, processor and cooling system, you need to carefully remove the plugs from the hinge lid, unscrew the two screws and remove the top decorative panel.

The problem with the battery is solved very simply:



Unscrewing the top cover of the cooling system, everything became clear:



Removing the radiator and cleaning the space a bit, I saw the beauty here:



Admit it, when was the last time you saw and touched such a story !? Please note that the processor is removable, in a standard package, in principle, it would be possible to put something newer if it were something.

He began to put in order the cooling system, cleaned the radiator from the felt boot, decided to lubricate the main fan so that it was quieter, there was nothing better at hand than the WD-40, but what, it is not smeared with it either! An additional fan died a long time ago, and the last time, before giving the laptop to my parents, I stuck a fan on the super glue, which they put on the cooling of the hard drives.

Naturally superglue withered and everything fell off, I decided to use more modern technologies. Having changed the thermal paste (by the way, the old one was still quite nothing) and putting the cooling system in place, I saw a more pleasant picture:



Once again, making sure of the genius of the engineers who develop this laptop, close the cooling system cover and put the decorative cover over the keyboard in place.

Well, here I can not pass by and not tell how the thermal paste on my working laptop is changing. To change the thermal paste, I need to disassemble the laptop to the last screw (no need to disassemble only the screen), since the processor is located on the motherboard below and the entire cooling system hangs upside down, that is, the heat goes through the motherboard up and heats the top surface of the laptop, so as a cooler, it naturally cannot dissipate all heat and take it away from the bottom.

And to get to the cooling system, you need to unscrew the top cover of the laptop, remove the keyboard and everything else, then unscrew the bottom cover from the inside and outside (because the motherboard is screwed to it), disconnect absolutely all connectors from the motherboard, remove the board, turn it over and after that see the cooling system.

I got distracted again, it's time to press the power button:



And in dogonku:



I will explain a little: the fact is that the laptop is already 12 years old, the matrix lamps should have sat for a long time (if we talked about modern matrices that live for 5-8 years), the lamps are not something that did not sit down, they have not even started to turn yellow and the white color looks really white.

It's time to go into the BIOS and see what's interesting there:



Regular PhoenixBIOS, a little different from modern BIOS.



Please note, there is already native USB support:



Standard security tab (subtle humor, taking into account how easy it is to access the hard drive):



In the selection of the boot order, you can select removable devices:



A naive attempt to boot from a flash drive did not succeed, although if I were not too lazy to connect an external USB floppy drive, I’m more than sure that I would be able to boot from a floppy disk.

Standard save settings page:



Save the settings and run:



I think that no one doubted that everything would work out quickly, first of all, there is the OS that the manufacturer recommended, and secondly, we have more than suitable hardware.

On the website of the manufacturer iRU there is a page dedicated to this laptop: iru.ru/product/34020 . You know, visiting her I was very upset, except for the main characteristics and information that the model is “in the archive” there is nothing there. But damn, guys, this is a story, this is a very awesome and interesting model, well, that’s what it was worth at least putting a couple of pictures, a brief description of the model and damn it, drivers, you could not even update them, but you had to leave them at least so that you can fully use the product!

Despite the lack of drivers on the site, everything I needed was quickly found, I downloaded the driver for the video card from the Internet, the drivers got off a half-kick of the sound, I could not start the modem, it did not turn on from the button, the driver put the USB driver on the USB card, Wi-Fi on I had a very common Ralink 2500 chip, I had drivers, I also had firewood on the card reader. In general, all the devices got what they wanted.

With such a huge screen resolution, the Start menu looks very small:



Screen Settings:



System properties:



Devices:



Is it possible to fully live on such an old laptop? In principle, you can, if you use this laptop is not often. The age of the cooler makes itself felt and works even though it is much quieter than before, but not as quiet as we would like, after half an hour of work the head wants to explode, although it may be due to the fact that now we have become too tender and sensitive.

Here it is, possible life:



The modern version of Firefox is installed and works quite well; of course, websites have become much harder over the past 10 years, but nevertheless they open up on hardware twelve years old.

On this, I think, it’s time to finish the first part, in the second part I will move on to experiments on this laptop, after all it’s interesting how much more modern operating systems can be run on the Pentium 4.

Thanks for attention!