Manual for Commtech K7TA-H?

bizzybody · BIOS Rookie Joined: 20 Oct 2007 Posts: 36

Not to be confused with the Abit KT7A! Wink

I picked up a "dead" Commtech K7TA-H for free. Popped the CMOS battery out for a bit, popped it back in, added a 1.2Ghz Athlon MP in the Socket A, stick of RAM, olde AGP video card and POST card and hooked up a power button.

It's a-liiiive! Unfortunately Commtech is one of those #%%@##$ companies that eliminates all info about their discontinued products. Sad

(The olde "Pi$$ off! Buy our new stuff!" attitude that makes me NOT want to buy from a company.)

I found a link to a PDF of the manual on some bare bones computer site (no updates since 2005) but all that downloads is a 300+ kb file that's completely blank. (How can a .PDF with no text and no pictures be over 300K?)

I also found with the Web Archive an old page from the Commtech site that showed the front panel connector pin assignments. Unfortunately the Archive got none of the FTP downloads. I got the last BIOS (1.5) from a ZD.net site in Germany.

That'll help but still no clue about the USB header or any other jumpers not marked on the board. Seeing how weird the FP connector is laid out, who knows how the USB header is configured.

cp · Posted: Tue Mar 18, 2008 11:59 am Post subject:

i'll send an email with the essentials (layout, jumpers, connectors) later today.
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bizzybody · BIOS Rookie Joined: 20 Oct 2007 Posts: 36

Thanks, that's the info I needed.

I can open the downloaded PDF in Photoshop and view it as 30 separate images, but Adobe Reader won't show anything but blank pages. Must be some TINY error in the file, or something the US English Reader doesn't like about this file from Taiwan...

Whatever, it's something *stupid* for which there's no reason for Reader to act that way.

bizzybody · BIOS Rookie Joined: 20 Oct 2007 Posts: 36

The problem with the manual is most people outside China don't have Chinese fonts on their computers.

When Adobe Reader doesn't find the Chinese font used in this manual, it displays NOTHING. Reader doesn't say anything like "This document uses Chinese fonts. Do you want to download them?". Acrobat does that, and after downloading those fonts (SEVEN MEGABYTES of fonts) it displays the contents of the PDF.

To fix that, I copied those fonts to Windows' fonts folder then used Acrobat to embed a subset of the one Chinese font used in the manual. The file size went up from 308K to 316K.

If someone wants to archive this version of the manual, I'll send it.

Edit: Grrrr! I copied the file to a PC without those Chinese fonts and Adobe Reader still will not display the contents!

edwin · Posted: Tue May 13, 2008 12:02 pm Post subject:

Can you send it to me? I'll have someone check it out and maybe fix it.
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bizzybody · BIOS Rookie Joined: 20 Oct 2007 Posts: 36

You can download the manual here.

http://www.bare-bone.com/download/ftp/bb-k7ta-266/k7ta10.pdf

I assume all it needs is the Chinese charaters removed, then it'll display in Reader without having to download and install the multi-megabytes of Chinese fonts and Chinese language support. (Complete document portability? HA!)