> Yes.  The suspend/resume has a few differnet power savings mode.  The
> highest power saving mode is closed to us at the moment because
> exiting it jumps to a ROM address (at least on the Vr machines).  This
> just might be possible to fix, but it may be hard.  I've not examined
> the memory in question.
> 
> Booting is likely going a lot harder because each device has its own
> "frob the hardware to a sane state" code that we'd have to write.
> 
> Also, there's an issue with physical placement of parts.  The flash
> chips and mask programable roms have different pinouts, last time I
> looked.

I think we'd really need some help from IBM in order to get this thing to a
really fun state; and they have virtually no incentive to do this (not more
than a handful of people would benefit, since it's an end-of-life product).

as it stands, a 'modern' replacement for a z50 would probably be something
like a Sony Picturebook, or an IBM X-series laptop. if one replaced the
spinning drives with a solid state one (cheapest route is probably to get a
CF->IDE adapter) it should really increase battery life.

http://www.sonystyle.com/vaio/picturebook/index.shtml

cool thing about this is that it's x86-based, so there's no
architecture hassles when compiling code, power management is
better-understood; and it boots anything natively, that can boot on x86.

Carl Soderstrom.
-- 
Network Engineer
Real-Time Enterprises
(952) 943-8700