anybody have experience with a Nec Z-1?

[Guest]

Archived from groups: alt.comp.hardware.pc-homebuilt (More info?)

Hi,

I'm "working" on a "very slow" Nec Z-1 running windows 98. It belongs to a
friend's daughter. I never saw one of these things before. They were made
and sold in 1999 and maybe early 2000, for $2,500.. They were onto
something with this, too bad they discontinued it. Nec also removed all
references to it from their website. They took a laptop screen and married
it to a motherboard mounted vertically behind the screen resulting in a one
piece computer, much like the apple Imacs. Anyway, what I was wondering was
if anybody wiped one of these and reinstalled win98? I'm concerned it may
have some proprietary drivers for an obscure sound chip, etc., and finding
that out after the format isn't such a hot idea.

Speaking of that, is there a directory in a win98 system that has the
drivers for the whole system in it or are they scattered all over the place?
If they are in one place I could burn a cd and not have to worry about
finding them later, etc.

It's a pentium 3 running at 450 MHz, and has an 8 gig hard drive.
Everything's integrated. The only design flaw I can see is they went with a
wireless keyboard. Which is ok as far as that goes, but they omited a
keyboard port. No ps2 ports at all. Because of that, I couldn't
communicate with the machine until I got the keyboard from the owner, which
of course, held things up for another week.
Thanks for any ideas on this,

Avery

 

[Guest]

Archived from groups: alt.comp.hardware.pc-homebuilt (More info?)

~ Avery Anderson~ wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I'm "working" on a "very slow" Nec Z-1 running windows 98. It belongs to a
> friend's daughter. I never saw one of these things before. They were made
> and sold in 1999 and maybe early 2000, for $2,500.. They were onto
> something with this, too bad they discontinued it. Nec also removed all
> references to it from their website. They took a laptop screen and married
> it to a motherboard mounted vertically behind the screen resulting in a one
> piece computer, much like the apple Imacs. Anyway, what I was wondering was
> if anybody wiped one of these and reinstalled win98? I'm concerned it may
> have some proprietary drivers for an obscure sound chip, etc., and finding
> that out after the format isn't such a hot idea.
>
> Speaking of that, is there a directory in a win98 system that has the
> drivers for the whole system in it or are they scattered all over the place?
> If they are in one place I could burn a cd and not have to worry about
> finding them later, etc.
>
> It's a pentium 3 running at 450 MHz, and has an 8 gig hard drive.
> Everything's integrated. The only design flaw I can see is they went with a
> wireless keyboard. Which is ok as far as that goes, but they omited a
> keyboard port. No ps2 ports at all. Because of that, I couldn't
> communicate with the machine until I got the keyboard from the owner, which
> of course, held things up for another week.
> Thanks for any ideas on this,
>
> Avery
>
>

NEC says these folks provide support for those machines:

http://www.priorityonesupport.com/

 

[BigJim]

Archived from groups: alt.comp.hardware.pc-homebuilt (More info?)

well go into device manager and see what is listed for the sound and video
you should be able to get a pretty good idea of what is in the system and
you may
be right, the drivers may be proprietary. BTW I remember that system being
sold
wow what a memory. I just can't remember anything my wife tells me to do.


"~ Avery Anderson~" <bogus@nowhere.net> wrote in message
news:MtidnYowhd7r4uTfRVn-pg@comcast.com...
> Hi,
>
> I'm "working" on a "very slow" Nec Z-1 running windows 98. It belongs to
> a friend's daughter. I never saw one of these things before. They were
> made and sold in 1999 and maybe early 2000, for $2,500.. They were onto
> something with this, too bad they discontinued it. Nec also removed all
> references to it from their website. They took a laptop screen and
> married it to a motherboard mounted vertically behind the screen resulting
> in a one piece computer, much like the apple Imacs. Anyway, what I was
> wondering was if anybody wiped one of these and reinstalled win98? I'm
> concerned it may have some proprietary drivers for an obscure sound chip,
> etc., and finding that out after the format isn't such a hot idea.
>
> Speaking of that, is there a directory in a win98 system that has the
> drivers for the whole system in it or are they scattered all over the
> place? If they are in one place I could burn a cd and not have to worry
> about finding them later, etc.
>
> It's a pentium 3 running at 450 MHz, and has an 8 gig hard drive.
> Everything's integrated. The only design flaw I can see is they went with
> a wireless keyboard. Which is ok as far as that goes, but they omited a
> keyboard port. No ps2 ports at all. Because of that, I couldn't
> communicate with the machine until I got the keyboard from the owner,
> which of course, held things up for another week.
> Thanks for any ideas on this,
>
> Avery
>

 

[Guest]

Archived from groups: alt.comp.hardware.pc-homebuilt (More info?)

Thanks, David , I regisstered, and they have all the drivers.

 

[Guest]

Archived from groups: alt.comp.hardware.pc-homebuilt (More info?)

Good news on two fronts:

1. The link David provided works and has all the drivers.
2. So does the help routine on the computer.

There was a "NEC Support Center" icon on the desktop so
I clicked on it to see what would happen, and it launched a
wizard for fixing hardware problems among other things.
Stepping through the video thing, after it told me video
drivers were on the restore CD, and I told it I didn't have
one, it asked me if i wanted it to see if there were any
drivers on the system it could use. I said OK. It said
trying that might bork the system, and if the system gets
borked it's on me, so is it ok to continue?,
and I told it yes.

Two reboots later I had it back to normal
plus an additional option was added, 24bit true color,
which I'm using.

I love the design of this thing. Truly, I think NEC made a
big mistake not continueing this model. The entire computer
takes up about 1/3 the space of a 15" CRT monitor.

Avery

 

[Guest]

Archived from groups: alt.comp.hardware.pc-homebuilt (More info?)

"~ Avery Anderson~" <bogus@nowhere.net> wrote in message
news:MtidnYowhd7r4uTfRVn-pg@comcast.com...
> Hi,
>
> I'm "working" on a "very slow" Nec Z-1 running windows 98. It belongs to
> a friend's daughter. I never saw one of these things before. They were
> made and sold in 1999 and maybe early 2000, for $2,500.. They were onto
> something with this, too bad they discontinued it. Nec also removed all
> references to it from their website. They took a laptop screen and
> married it to a motherboard mounted vertically behind the screen resulting
> in a one piece computer, much like the apple Imacs. Anyway, what I was
> wondering was if anybody wiped one of these and reinstalled win98? I'm
> concerned it may have some proprietary drivers for an obscure sound chip,
> etc., and finding that out after the format isn't such a hot idea.
>
> Speaking of that, is there a directory in a win98 system that has the
> drivers for the whole system in it or are they scattered all over the
> place? If they are in one place I could burn a cd and not have to worry
> about finding them later, etc.
>
> It's a pentium 3 running at 450 MHz, and has an 8 gig hard drive.
> Everything's integrated. The only design flaw I can see is they went with
> a wireless keyboard. Which is ok as far as that goes, but they omited a
> keyboard port. No ps2 ports at all. Because of that, I couldn't
> communicate with the machine until I got the keyboard from the owner,
> which of course, held things up for another week.
> Thanks for any ideas on this,
>
> Avery
>

Have a look at www.driverguide.com

Signup (it's free) and perform a 'simple search'. Type in : NEC Z-1

Returns 5 drivers. 1 x Network adapter, 1 x Creative sound drivers, 2 x
Video drivers, 1 x Multimedia keyboard utility.

TheDysk