Digital Archaeology: Averatec 3200

darth-azrael (67)in #retrocomputing • 2 days ago

The Averatec 3200 was a low-end laptop model with an emphasis on DVD playback. While it seems to be reasonably well built, it does have quite a few limitations in order to cut costs. Having said that, if you were on a budget and it was sufficient for your needs at the time, it wasn't a bad deal.

The Averatec 3200 featured a mobile Athlon XP processor which was essentially just a regular Athlon XP that ran at a lower voltage. These were highly desired by desktop builders because they would typically run at "normal" voltages and be excellent overclockers. It's most direct competitor would have been a mobile Pentium 4 but by the time the Averatec 3200 came out there were better choices, mainly in the form of the Pentium M. It looks like the Averatec 3200 became available some time in late 2004 and was available at least at Best Buy, Sam's, Newegg, Circuit City and Amazon and probably from other retailers as well. It looks like the configurations probably varied slightly depending on the retailer. For instance, the one I am using has an Athlon XP 2000+ whereas it looks like Newegg had one with a 2200+.

Some of the features of my particular model include:

CPU: Athlon XP-M 2000+
Video: VIA/S3 UniChrome with 32 MBytes of DDR SDRAM
Screen: 12.1" @ 1024x768
Memory: 1 GB DDR PC2700 (This has likely been upgraded)
Hard Drive: Hitachi 40GB E-IDE (ATA-6)
Optical Drive: Slimtype COMBO SOSC-2483K DVD-ROM/CD-RW
WiFi: MSI 802.11g MiniPCI Wireless Network Adapter
Ethernet: VIA VT6102 Rhine II Fast Ethernet Adapter

Plus VGA port, 3 USB ports, and a single cardbus slot. For more complete specs see the output of HWiNFO here.

Limitations include the relatively limited number of ports plus the fact that there is only one memory slot so 1 GB is probably as far as the memory can be expanded in this laptop. Plus, the XP-M was kind of old tech at this point. As mentioned before the Pentium M was becoming the dominant mobile CPU at this time and in most cases they were as fast of faster than an XP-M would have been and they were certainly more energy efficient making for longer battery life.

However, the big advantage of this laptop was price. Depending on where you got it and the exact configuration, it cost around $1000 which was pretty cheap for the time. And while the Athlon XP-M may not have been the latest tech or the most energy efficient mobile processor, it was still reasonably powerful. The S3 Unichrome graphics were a slight upgrade to the S3 ProSavage and were not very good. But then you weren't going to find strong graphics capabilities in any budget laptop, regardless of brand. The only real (relatively minor) complaint I have with this laptop is the keyboard. It actually feels pretty good for the most part but some of the keys are smaller than others making typing a little awkward. Fortunately, it only affects lesser used keys like the arrow keys, the greater than/less than keys, slashes and punctuation. I find myself hitting the wrong arrow key or the slash instead of an arrow (or vice versa). But overall, it's a pretty small issue.

Drivers were somewhat problematic to find. I installed Windows XP and for the most part things worked fine. However, while the graphics were the proper resolution and color depth, screen draw was very slow until I tracked down the proper drivers which took a while. Also, Wi-Fi didn't work out of the box either so I had to find those drivers as well. In addition, I had to track down sound and modem drivers (not that I really needed the modem). Most of these I had to track down by device ID as Averatec is no longer in business as far as I can tell and even if they were I doubt they would have drivers available to download for such old hardware. In theory, you should also be able to install a 32-bit version of Linux (but more RAM would be better).

The Athlon XP and Windows XP are still capable of running a variety of BOINC projects. So far it has processed work for Einstein@home, Asteroids@home, World Community Grid and MilkyWay@home. One oddity I noticed was the the laptop would sometimes freeze while running the screensaver or fail to wake up. I thought at first it might be a thermal issue but I disabled the BOINC screensaver (not the crunching itself, just the screensaver) and the problem was solved. There's probably some issue with the relatively obscure Unichrome graphics and whatever the screensaver is doing. Or it could just be a driver issue but I think I'm using the latest that were available. At any rate, it works fine if I disable the screensaver or use a non-BOINC screensaver so it turns out not to be a big deal. In addition to the individual project links above, you can also see how this laptop is doing overall via BOINCStats or FreeDC.