This is my entry for the RetroChallenge of 2024. I know that the rules specified for a “retro” computer, and I think a Nokia Booklet 3G is worthy of the label, because it was released back in 2009, and that makes it 15 years old, even if the unit is still pretty usable in 2024, as shown by sizeof.cat in their extensive post, and also using it for a week for the Old Computer Challenge 2024 earlier this year. I’ve written as well about this little jewel and you can read more about it in my article.

I have to admit, I was jealous when I saw the aforementioned cat use their booklet for the OCC2024, but luckily I had a lot of devices to pick from, as I have a big collection of computers of all ages. So I decided that I will use one of the many booklets I have for a future project, and this was the perfect occasion.

A couple of months ago, I bought some 74th-hand computers (because they weren’t second hand anymore, judging by the state in which they were), because it contained a Nokia Booklet among some Acers and Packard Bells and other chinese-made-german-branded units, and the seller moronically said that the lid is white, which was not, of course. Make sure to ask for photos if you’re not going to collect the product yourself! If you read my post above, you saw that I have a blue one and several black ones, but the white acrylic top still eludes me to this day. Almost everything in the job lot was mostly junk, as the units had already most of their valuable things stripped off. I wanted to keep the Booklet, but its battery bulged a lot, had leaked and fused with the chassis, so it was a nice fire hazard. Luckily, the booklet opens on the other side, so I was able to salvage the HDD, the Wifi and 3G cards and also the display assembly, to use for any project.

So as a project for this year’s Retro Challenge, I decided to get said display assembly, to paint it orange, to match the theme of “Halloween” of this year and replace it on one of the functional Booklets I have. Some of them are in perfect working order, but some others are haunted by various problems, and I chose to pick one that had a borked and unactivated Windows installation, which is weird, as all the units came from a company that phased them out. I think someone tried to install a different Windows version on this than the bundled Windows 7 Starter, it even had WinRAR in Russian already installed, so that’s that.

Part One: Painting

People know that I try to be handy, although I’m not. I once tried to solder two wires to a pin each on a DIN-9 connector and I managed to solder zero wires and four pins one to the other. I’ve almost burned my house down while trying to make a sandwich. If “clumsy” was an RPG stat, I’d definitely put most of my level points in there. So I started by searching online “how to paint plastic”, even though the cover of the Booklet is acrylic.

So I started by properly sanding the surface, cleaning it, sanding it some more, cleaning it with isopropyl alcohol, degreasing it and then cleaning it some more. I applied the first coat which was pretty bad, then sanded and cleaned and applied a second coat which went actually worse, then sanded once more and went for a third, and then a fourth coat. I think I should have stopped earlier, but when I saw the result of the fourth coat, I just went like “fuck it, the colour is even, it’s covered all over and the pattern makes it look a bit more janky”. So I upped the jank factor to eleven, and just decided to just leave it as it is.

Some lessons I learned from this procedure is that using double-sided tape all around the screen to keep the paint from getting to the electronics was a good decision, but next time I try this, I need to use a tape that’s not this janky and leaves too much residue on the things where it sticks. Taping the wires on the other side of the cardboard using sticky tape was also a good idea to prevent getting paint stuck into the connectors or to rip the cables by mistake.

As a first attempt to paint something, I find it very janky, but still looks like a decent result. I was thinking about searching for some Halloween-themed stickers and small decorations, to make it more Halloween-ish., but I think I’ll just leave it simple, as I like a lot the colour.

Part Two: Mounting, testing, beauty shots

Changing the display on a Booklet is a fairly easy task, and I’ve done it before, so I didn’t expect any issues here, except for the fact that being as dumb as I usually am, I totally forgot to do something very important before the first step, and that was to test the display from the scavenged machine. Will it work? Does the backlight still work? Does it have any dead pixels? No one knows. Only this morning I realized how dumb I was, because I spent all that time and energy to paint a display which may not work.

So after removing the janky double-sided tape from the assembly (well, most of it), I added the screen protector back and then I took the receiving laptop, opened it up, removed the old display (maybe paint one green for St. Patrick’s day?) and added the new assembly in its place. I connected all the wires (remember to take photos before disassembling something so you know what goes back where), connected a charger and powered the computer up.

Oh the surprise! I had when the computer booted and things started to appear on the screen! It turns out the display is fine and the backlight works fine, there are no dead pixels, and even the Wi-fi seems to get reception, so the cables are all in the proper place. I didn’t test the 3G, because I don’t have a compatible SIM card, and I won’t use it in town anyway.

Put next to the other two colours I have, the laptop looks brilliant and I’m actually happy with the result! I mean, see for yourself!

Part Three: Software

I’m going to keep the current OS installed, as it looks as a janky install of Windows 7, where some drivers are not installed, especially the video one, however the media keys seem to work fine. The first step I’ll have to do is to activate Windows, by definitely using the serial key on the bottom and not the Activation Scripts one can find on github. I also used that tool to switch the installation from Windows 7 Starter to Windows 7 Professional, and then activate it.

Once this was done, I’ve started to work on the jankiest possible Halloween theme to use, with a nice wallpaper and some nice contrasting colours, to remind both of Halloween and the 90s. I’ve seearched wallhaven.cc as always, and I found a few cute ones, as usual, filtering out Anime, AI Art and leaving only SFW results, because the amount of titties is too damn high, and I want a funny build, not porn. I finally went with this one because it’s colourful and puts in value the screen of the Booklet.

I’ve managed to “design” a full on janky black-and-orange theme that looks like crap and is mostly unusable. I love it! Windows gives some colours customizations, but as Win 7 was already starting to migrate various UI components to the Aero design, not everything can be customized, or one specific colour will be set in twenty places, but it’s fine. I would have loved a fully orange taskbar, but I can’t do that without changing the entire color scheme.

In terms of entertainment, we’re going to use VLC version 0.9.8a, because we don’t need too much advanced stuff, and we’re gonna watch some of the best Halloween-related titles: Addams Family Animated (1992), Scooby-Doo, Where Are You? (1969), The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy (2003) and Tales from the Crypt (1989).

We can’t be talking about entertainment without talking about music, so I’m gonna put a folder that I used to have on a party DVD, and for playback, I’m going to use Winamp 2.9.5 with the HalloweenAMP skin. I found better looking skins, but this is so janky and confusing, it had to be this one.

I’ve also taken some time to make a new boot screen using the Windows 7 Boot Updater software (which I won’t link because it doesn’t work), but it somehow doesn’t apply it properly and it still shows the default blank one ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. At least you can see a mockup of how it would look, it’s not something impressive, but it could have been a cool addition.

I could install some other programs and tools, but I’ll just leave it to these and start playing. But first, sheep.exe!

Part Four: Games

What’s the reason of making such a silly build if we’re not gonna play on it? So let’s go and test some more games than I did last time I wrote about the Nokia Booklet 3G.

• ❌ Quake 2 – Installed it, but it just won’t open. The quake2.exe process seems to be running, but it’s not doing too much. I’ll have to work on that a bit.
• ✅ Mortal Kombat 4 – Runs and plays super well, but I need to reconfigure the buttons.
• ✅ Worms Armageddon – Runs and plays just fine, I managed to win a quick game.
• ✅ Diablo 2 – Opens, but runs on a very low framerate (something like 15FPS). Running it in windowed mode (adding -w at the end of the path in the shortcut) make is way smoother.
• ✅ Warcraft III – Similar to D2, the framerate is very low, but could be tweaked to be better.
• ❌ Unreal Tournament – Throws an error and closes. Tried various video settings, but it still won’t open.
• ❌ Prepelix (a Romanian branded version of Moorhuhn) – Throws an error (DirectDraw Init FAILED) and closes.

For shits and giggles, I tried to play some of the games I’m usually running on my retro computers:

• ✅ Hoyle Board Games 2001 – Runs just fine.
• ✅ Kyodai Mahjong – Runs fairly smooth in 3D, an average of 25FPS.
• ✅ Midtown Madness 2 – Runs decent, has some frame drops, but still playable.
• ❌ Need for Speed III – loaded the menu fine, but crashed at the end of the race loading screen, NFS Porsche crashes when launching.
• ✅ Half-Life/Counter-Strike – Works really well in 640x480 software mode. Open GL works decent too, but screenshots turned out completely black.
• ❌ FIFA 2000 – The game opens but after loading a match, it crashes.

Re-installing/upgrading DirectX – The installer is “initializing…” for about 10 minutes and then it threw an error that it can’t download a specific file. That’s what you get with these crap internet installers. I managed to find a redistributable DirectX installer that worked, but it didn’t seem to improve too much on the experience above, so that’s not it. I could wipe the system completely and reinstall the OS, but I’d rather focus on what works on this haunted installation.

Part Four: Conclusion

It was nice to work on this project, and even if it’s not “ancient”, this still counts as retro in my book. The main problem with the Booklet will always and forever remain its RAM, which is soldered and limited to 1GB. This will always put a very hard limit on its performance and usability, especially if trying to browse the “modern” internet. Otherwise, it’s a nice toy, can be useful for various tasks like RSS reading, browsing some retro websites, chat on IRC and use email. It can also be used for coding and building stuff, so even if it’s retro, it’s not yet obsolete. A lovely machine that, despite its small issues, manages to live proudly in 2024. It definitely is a tinkering project and you have a lot of tweaks that you need to do to it to make it usable, but as the inspiration cat nicely put it in this article, the Nokia Booklet 3G can work nicely as a retro station even today. As for me, if VLC, Winamp, a browser and IRC run fine, then it’s all good.

Part Five: Another swing

Since Eric suggested to make some updates on this article as I fiddle with the Booklet for the month, I made a battle plan for the month which started with replacing the HDD of the booklet with an SSD, because I was 140% positive I had another two Micro SATA SanDisk SSDs in my box of things, but apparently the only ones I have are some ZIFs I wanted to use on some iPods.

As you can see, I hit the small roadblock of my upgrade, but I was lucky enough to find some fresh hard drives from some older Booklets, so I guess it’s time to go exploring! Luckily, I bought a while ago a Micro SATA to USB adapter, so I can browse the content of those drives.

Ordered from left to right, the first hard drive had what I’ll call “the corporate version”, it’s a Windows 7 Starter installation with some corporate videos from the company where the laptops were taken from. The second drive has what looks like a Windows 7 Professional install, and I remember I used this on a very cursed build where no drivers would install under any circumstances. The third seems borked, as it has a partition that neither MacOS nor Windows would recognize, so I assume it’s a failed Windows installation, because of the “System Reserved” partition that’s next to it. The good part is that the first two drives still have the original Recovery partition with stuff from Nokia, which are very useful if we ever want to return this to factory conditions.

Upon booting again the Booklet, I see that the wallpaper is gone and the “This copy of Windows is not genuine” nag message reappeared, so this can mean only one thing: 🪓. Let’s do a fresh windows install, as the current install is not very stable and stuff seems to be borked. So I tried to emulate the first part of the article by sizeof.cat and installed Windows 7 Professional along with the default drivers, to have a stock Win7 setup which I can bork myself. However, it didn’t take long to achieve said performance, as gaming on Windows 7 on this computer feels like owning a motorcycle, where you keep it 11 months in the garaje fiddling with various tubes and screws and spark plugs and innards to be able to enjoy it for 2 hours on a Saturday afternoon when it’s not raining. Straight out of the box, the alternate driver threw errors when installing, with Diablo 2 not even running, throwing the error that DirectDraw cannot be initialized. I tried reinstalling DirectX in hope than it would fix any of the problems, but I guess gaming on the Booklet requires a bit of witchcraft, because not even a command prompt would run in full-screen mode.

After reinstalling DirectX, I rebooted and tried a few of the games I previously tried, and the performance was pretty bad. I like this laptop for how well and smart it’s designed, but for many times I feel that Nokia did some really bad decisions when engineering this, and from a software point of view, it seems really really cursed and requires you to jump through a lot of hoops to make it work. The next step will be to nuke everything once more, and try from scratch with the standard recovery partition, and to speed things up, I think I’m just going to replace the hard drive with one of the spares.

More updates soon.