Nc6120 Drivers

[Marie Ota]

I am having the above problem - and, despite trying suggestions that suited Win7 & 8, I simply can't get the driver to install - hs anyone managed to accomplish this or does anyone have any further ideas that might help at all?

Click on the driver tab. Click on Update Driver. Select the Browse my computer for driver software method, and then at the bottom of that window, select the Let me pick from a list of device drivers on my computer.

You have a better driver that you can try. It is the MS basic display driver tweaked for our custom resolutions. Check this: GitHub - ywjheart/basic_adapter_driver_modification: BasicAdapterDriver Modification

Then with Win8, MS removed the code from the kernel to support XPDM drivers. I found this out the hard way when I tried to update an old XP-era PC using a 915GM to Win8 and the drivers would not load -- anymore.

In an attempt to find a laptop which has a parallel port but is modern enough to run Windows 7, I stumbled across the HP Compaq NC6120, which is equipped with a Pentium M 760 processor and 2GB of RAM (the maximum possible). Windows 2000, XP and Vista drivers for this laptop can still be downloaded from HP website here. I also managed to install Windows 7 using the Windows Vista drivers. This is the CPUID dialog running on this laptop:

One thing I must say about this laptop is that it has a lot of ports. There are 4 USB 2.0 ports, Firewire/parallel/serial/VGA/modem/Ethernet ports as well as a card reader slot for SD/MS-Pro/MMC cards. There is even an S-Video port for video output. For a while I tried to plug in my PS2 mouse, only to realize that there are no PS2 ports. There were also options for wireless, Bluetooth and infrared which did not come with my unit.

At this point it is a matter of trial and error, searching Google for the relevant download links, while being careful not to install any so-called driver scanners, which will just install malware. It took me almost a day but eventually I managed to locate the drivers for all of the above, except for the display adapter and the card reader. Apparently there have never been any Windows 98 drivers for the Mobile Intel 910/915, so I have to resort to using VBEMP which works up to 1024768 (32-bit colors) without 3D acceleration:

For the card reader, under Windows 98, I could not get the OS to detect any cards despite trying various drivers. The same card worked fine under Windows XP and Windows 7. I have to conclude that the card reader is not supported under Windows 98.

Although there are no packet drivers for this particular network card (none that I tried worked to be exact), I was able to follow the instructions here and create an NDIS to Packet Driver Converter (also known as shimming), allowing various DOS networking tools such as MTCP to work. The below photo shows a minimal startup of Microsoft Network Client (which loads the NDIS2 driver), followed by the shim converter taking over to set up the packet driver, and ended with MTCP being successfully loaded:

After successfully installing Windows 98 and setting up DOS networking, I am very happy with my NC6120. The laptop will be a valuable tool for me as I frequently work with the parallel port. The serial port will also be useful in monitoring output from the embedded devices. The rest of the ports could come in handy later.

If the driver listed is not the right version or operating system, search our driver archive for the correct version. Enter HP Compaq nc6120 into the search box above and then submit. In the results, choose the best match for your PC and operating system.

The loudspeakers are not too bad for a notebook. They are good enough to watch a film, but not to enjoy music. Compared to the Toshiba 4090 they are much better. But I still recommend some earphones or external loudspeakers.

And here a short and a long version of the lspci output. To check the kernel modules which are used in my Debian installation, I created a list of them. Not all of them are necessary, of course. There are also some for NFS, IPSec and so on.

Additionally to the modules getting loaded at boot time I added some more to /etc/modules. The file is here. I also grab a script from the Ubuntu installation which was created by HP and makes some settings for the display output and special keys on the NC6120.

Update 17.07.2005

I now played around with the different ACPI suspend modes and therefore patched my kernel with the newest stable (2.1.9.5) Software Suspend 2 patch. The new configuration is here. You have to modify the standard resume partition in the kernel configuration (Power Management Options -> Software Suspend 2 -> Default resume device name). Download the Software Suspend 2 patch from and decompress it. Then go to your kernel source directory. Apply the patch via /path-to-patch/apply. If no errors are reported you can recompile the kernel. After compiling and installing it, you have to recompile the ipw2200 driver, too. For further information have a look at the power management section.

Update 10.11.2007Now I use Kernel 2.6.23.1. It is working fine. You can find a configuration here. It is configured to be used with PowerTop and Linux-PHC to reduce the power consumption (see Power management section).

Wireless LAN is running well here. I downloaded the newest driver (1.0.4) from In addition you need the appropriate firmware image and a patch for kernel 2.6.12. After decompressing the driver package, you have to apply the patch. Change the current directory to the root directory of the driver package and usepatch -p0

Update 17.07.2005

Now I use version 1.0.6 of the ipw2200 driver. The installation procedure is the same like for the old version except that you now have to install the ieee80211 driver package. It can be found on I use version 1.0.3 of it. Just unpack it and run make and make install. After that you can compile the ipw2200 driver. If you have an old version of the ipw2200 driver installed, delete all related files under /lib/modules/[your-kernel] and reboot the notebook before compiling the new drivers.

I took a configuration file from the Ubuntu installation I still had on my notebook. You can find it here. On Sarge there is no driver for the i810 or i915 graphics card included. The only way to get it running is the VESA driver in combination with the 855resolution tool (see basic installation section). You have to patch a mode to 1400x1050 resolution. Change the configuration file /etc/default/855resolution to MODE=5a, XRESO=1400 and YRESO=1050. Otherwise you can only get 1280x1024. This is also OK, but I want to use the full resolution and all lower resolutions are a little bit unsharp.

Anyway, I think the notebook should use the correct resolution for the external screen if you switch it on while it is closed. Maybe some more people have to complain about that. And maybe somebody should ask, why this port replicator has a power button if you have to open the notebook anyway. And why is it called docking station on the HP website?????

Update 09.01.2007

With the recent Xorg server version in Debian testing it is possible to run the X-Server with two displays. I have two configurations, one using Xinerama and two different resolutions (1280x1024 for extern and 1400x1050 for intern) but no 3D acceleration. The other one just uses the internal display and provides 3D acceleration.

Update 10.11.2007

The Intel i810 driver was updated in the latest Xorg server version. It provides much better support for the i915 graphics of the NC6120. The 855resolution tool is not necessary any more, the driver has native support for all resolutions. Unfortunately the Xinerama configuration does not work any more by using the xorg.conf from above. With my new configuration, you can set the Xinerama mode by using the following command:

Update 15.11.2007

I now found a web page with some explanations regarding Xrandr settings in the xorg.conf file. So it is not necessary to call the command above manually any more. You can find my new configuration here. The instructions came from

To run suspend to disk you need the hibernate script. There is an old version included in Sarge, but I use the current version (1.10). Just run install.sh out of the tar.gz package to install it. My configuration for hibernate is here. It is not fully tested and optimized yet. But it successfully restores the X session and everything else I am using at the moment. I think you should read at least the HowTo from the Suspend 2 website to be familiar with possible problems. There are some pitfalls which might result in corrupted data.

After installing and configuring everything you can run hibernate as root or sudo hibernate as normal user. Pressing the power button will resume the Linux session (if you choose the correct kernel to boot).

Thanks to a visitor of my web pages, I got a hint to try Linux-PHC. It is a tool to undervolt the processor for each frequency it can run. This results in a cooler CPU and thus in less noise and less power consumption. It is really great! After the patch for Linux-PHC is applied, you have to search for each frequency for the lowest voltage ID (VID) you can use without a crash. On my notebook, the default VIDs for the 5 different frequencies were set as follows:

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