I’m a huge fan of laptops from this era. Not only for nostalgia reasons, since this is what I grew up with, but also since it was a golden age of laptop upgradability. I’ve got a few ThinkPads and Compaqs of the era, and they’re great machines.
Yeah, pretty much everything had socketed cpu's. The reverse of today.... Absolutely everything was socketed, modular batteries, sometimes dual battery capable.
No doubt people don't understand their smartphones tech is fitted in with the increasing power and performance of laptops. Asus and Razer are the masters.
In my work and study of vintage computers over the past few years, I have consistently been impressed with Dell’s designs, quality, and continued legacy support. Well done, Dell team!
this might be the first retro computer that i’ve seen on youtube that i actually have. used it a lot when i was a kid and ended up inheriting it from my dad. sure, it’s definitely worse for wear but certainly still usable. remember playing rollercoaster tycoon 3 on it and it handling it pretty damn well.
@@dylanash2569 I haven't tried it, but I can't imagine it would be too great, seeing as I tried running Minecraft on it back in 2013 and I got maybe 10 FPS on it. It wasn't really playable and I imagine that things such as Aero just wouldn't work and Windows 7 era games would probably choke. Still have it, suppose I could give it a shot. Main limitation is that it's a 32-bit CPU
@@majoryoshi I ask cause I used to run 7 decently well on an AMD Turion and while performance wasnt great in many games, it worked well as an office machine.
The Windows XP retro gaming scene is going to be an interesting one, because XP was supported for so long up to Windows 7 and even beyond into 2015. The poor reception of Vista really prolonged it's lifespan. I currently have XP set up on my 2011 Thinkpad T420, one of the last laptop generations to have native support for the OS.
@@milescarter7803 no, just the standard Intel one. Don't expect that model to do high end XP gaming. It seems to be most comfortable at 720p at Medium settings with games like CoD 2 and Battlefront II. It only really starts to struggle with Battlefield 2.
@@milescarter7803You can play pre vista era games on it. XP is fully supported till 3rd generation intel core processors. You can search drivers online.
I absolutely love these types of videos. I have many XP era laptops loaded down with games. Also if you want a more modern laptop that's very small, with hours of battery life while playing, I recommend the Dell Latitude 3189. You can get them under $100, they have windows 11, and are on par gaming and benchmark wise with an ATi 9800pro. I put a usb external SSD on that sucker and loaded it down with all my GOG games. It is a great pre 2004 gaming pc( an era that has a lot of nostalgia for me as that was my teens and early adulthood). Great for all those unreal engine 2 games and below. Handles dosbox great too. Resolution of the screen is 1366x768, so a lot of these games will run at 1024x768 or you can use widescreen mods. Also a glide wrapper like DgVoodoo will get those glide games running just great. This little hunk of junk is great for travel, it's light, and you can game on the battery for at least 3 hours. I did it playing Deus Ex and Gothic 2. It's a great option for the retro pc user that needs a little pc for travel that can browse the web safely.
I had a machine from this family growing up... It feels weird to think of it as retro tech, but at the same time exciting to see coverage of something so niche that also connects with me on a deeply personal level. Thank you for this!
We had a load of these at a company I was working at around 2004/2005. They were not really corporate laptops and so they failure rate was bad, every single one needed a motherboard replacement. I was told they were more of a home machine or gaming machine, more cutting edge specs and more heat as a result.
In fairness, the Dell corporate laptops of the era got clogged quickly with hair and dander, overheated and died. I even had a few of the 2006-2007 era with dead motherboards right out of the box. I have hung on to a few Dell mobile workstations of the era, but the keyboards are missing keys... They do fly with XP though
I think you're glossing over what a weird thing the P4 was here, especially crammed into a laptop. The Pentium M chips of that time would have performed similarly if not better, and so it's weird to me how Intel was pushing P4 chips into laptops, creating unnecessary internal competition with a CPU that didn't perform like they intended. P4 chips were an evolutionary dead end. Intel had to go back to the Pentium M, which was based entirely on the Pentium 3, to start making good CPUs again - the Core line we know til this day. It's like Intel was hungover from drinking all that megaherz koolaid in the 90s, gaslighting themselves into believing a 3ghz P4 made sense when a lower clocked Pentium M would've outperformed it and drawn less power doing it. The IBM Thinkpad T42 with Pentium M and Radeon 9600 was a far better machine for gaming, and it should have been for sale around the same time.
I don't know if I'd call anything with an FX 5200 a "lucky find", but I admit there was much worse in the laptop world back then, and even having a discrete GPU in a laptop back then was uncommon. But you were definitely limited to very old games on that card, even by 2003 standards.
ah, what an absolutely miserable machine. P4 laptops were truly the worst of every world: hot, slow, expensive, and left so immediately in the dust by every class of new machine that you wondered why you bothered in the first place. comparing this to my first Vista laptop (an Acer Aspire, lmfao) was night and day even then. the only thing i miss is the keyboard!
This video's definitely a Nostalgia trip for me, thank you for uploading this! I had the 5150 Brand New when I started College, (later on I was also given the 5100, which is a celeron-based processor variant) I'll tell you one thing though, the laptop doesn't age well; repeated RMA's to Dell Tech Support, due to various components failing, (Motherboard, Power Supply, Power Jack, Hard Drive, Battery, etc.) just about everything's failed on the laptop and had to be replaced, even several times! But, as a daily driver for Years, that laptop served me well! (and yes, I did carry the hefty laptop+power supply with me everywhere, it wasn't easy! 😂)
We had the same experience, for some reason they were bought for use by our consultants who were doing database work on them, building cubes (Microsoft Analysis Services) etc, so they had a hard life.
The 5100, 5150, & 5160 had SO MANY design flaws that I'd hazard a guess that any that have survived intact this far have either been repaired, or are time bombs waiting to go off. I had a 5150 as my daily driver from 2004 through 2010, and as my portable until 2011 when it got replaced with a Cr-48. I got lucky - I had the extended service warranty at the time so I didn't have to pay for the three motherboards and four power supplies that failed. I'm a bit disappointed that this particular model was used, because I expect there are a lot of people who might get one, only for one of the many issues to crop up on them.
Yep mine would over heat constantly. The fan failed headphone jack failed, battery failed, disc drive failed, hard drive failed all under warranty too. By the end I was left with a fully refurbished laptop which is why it lasted so long.
Don't forget you can plug in a USB hub, keyboard, mouse and VGA monitor still. You then can use any resolution you want for gaming. I think this is an excellent option
I remember I bought a new HP Pavillion desktop PC in 2003. I was really impressed with XP's stability; it just worked. The Win98 SE box it replaced was crash-y, especially with USB devices.
I bought a Dell Inspiron 5100 about a year ago and did all of the things no one in their right mind would do. I used it for modern day tasks with Windows xp. Even though it was slow more often than not, it still managed to be usable.
Thanks for this glimpse into WinXP gaming laptop era. My personal preference is Toshiba Satellite 5205-705. It’s a Pentium 4 machine with GeForce 5600go, gorgeous 1600x1200 screen and rich Yamaha sound powered by two speakers and subwoofer. The screen is really good even by today standards, and gpu is capable of running most pre-2004 year games. Plus Yamaha chip helps running dos games (under win 98) with general midi music.
I just had mine arrive yesterday for my retro laptop collection. I had it's identical cousin growing up (1100) and I remember this model being one of the famous lawsuit models. One overheated frequently and the other could catch fire if I remember correctly.
One of these old chunks of metal was my first computer ever. It was a different model though. A Latitude D630 from 2007 that came with Windows Vista Business installed on it that was a hand me down from our neighbors. When I got my hands on it, it ran windows 7 professional. Then, I upgraded it to windows 10 32 bit. I tried installing 64 bit windows 10 on it, but it struggled on it, so I went with Linux.
This was the first "new" PC I got, when starting college in 2003. They have a design defect where if the backlight is at anything but full brightness, and anything else draws power (eg, the hard disk seeking) the backlight flickers. Dell replaced the video card, the motherboard, the display, then the whole machine. Then on machine #2 they did the video card, the video card again, the motherboard, the display, then the whole machine. By this point the 5150 wasn't made anymore, and they gave me a 9600. I was able to talk them into swapping it for a 600m - the first Centrino / Pentium M laptop from Dell. It was a fantastic machine and I used it for many years! I'd love another 600m, but I don't really want another 5150...
My grandma bought me this exact laptop back in 2004-ish. I remember building it on Dell's website which was so cool back then. I made sure it had built in 802.11g wifi. It had a problem with the DC jack when I sold it. Memories!!!
I have one similar the 9100 Inspiron, but my hinges were super stiff and broke recently, but I still kept all the stuff until I can fix them, love your videos Colin
From what I read, Windows XP will support NVidia graphics up to Maxwell, but Optimus support requires Windows 7 or later. So the highest performing Windows XP laptop would be a vista-era gaming laptop.
I have a Dell Inspiron 510m which is very similar to the one in the video. I was attracted to the blue and silver color scheme. I originally bought it to use as a retro machine but so far haven't got round to it. For a while I preferred the Dell Latitude D430 as an XP machine as it's smaller and lighter, not to mention more powerful and with a more modern selection of slots and ports.
Thanks for the trip down memory lane. This was my first laptop back in college, and was used for 3D animation. That thing was huge, and heavy! The Pentium 4 at the time was a beast, especially when it came to the heat that machine put out. When rendering, I'd always have it propped up to let more air through.
I still have a fully functional Gateway M500s from the same era. It had a unique (for the era) widescreen and media control setup, with a modestly impressive speaker set with subwoofer built-in. I’m going to dig the machine out and clean it up, maybe drop in solid state storage, but it’s an incredible gaming machine for the era … at least as a portable DOS and even limited console/arcade machine emulation (which is exactly what the machine did when I wasn’t doing work on it). I used to play everything through N64/PlayStation without issue on the mobile Pentium 4. Great stuff!
I've always wanted a Falcon Northwest Fragbook from the Windows XP era, but considering the pain I went through of using a Dell Latitude from 2005 (arguably NOT a gaming laptop), I think I would pass based mainly of having to put up with a main HDD with the antiquated 44-pin IDE/PATA interface when the newer and more common SATA were just becoming a thing. Sure, nowadays I _could_ just get an mSATA to PATA adapter and run off SSD, but it doesn't seem practical for just a retro gaming machine that I don't exactly use every day.
My uncle had that laptop! It was a good desktop replacement, since he replaced his desktop with that laptop! Also he had some games installed like Halo 1, Black and White, Warcraft, The Oregon Trail the 4th Edition, and Diablo II on his computer!
Got a Dell Inspiron 8600, running a Pentium-M 1.5ghz, GF Go FX5200 64MB video, 80GB IDE HD, and I've upgraded it to 1.5GB of RAM. I threw all the old games (CivII, NfS I, II, III, and many more) on it. Great old machine.
I think i have one of these in the garage from my mother in laws office. I preferred a Thinkpad over it. But fun to see this in the spotlight, I'll have to pull it out and see which one runs better!
woooow we had this one back in the day, my dad bought it for his work. oh those memories! in 2009 i bought a samsung r560 with my own money - a laptop with a bluray drive! in 2009! still have that thing lying around somewhere... had drive broke.
I had this laptop back in the day. Looks like the same specs too. It wasn't bad but I wound up using an older P3 laptop for......mobile.... things. Working on my car during a hot summer with this thing on my leg connected to the odb II port was painful. Also because of the CPU the battery life was terrible. Running games though, you didn't need a heater in the room, it blew hot air like a hair dryer.
I really appreciate you using both metric and imperial system of measurements when talking about weight and dimensions. Too often am I annoyed at English-speaking youtubers not realizing they're using an international language
I had this laptop in college. I bought it new in 2004. I used it up until 2012 and upgraded it to 4gb of ram. I actually had a lot of issues with it, one being that this laptop would constantly overheat, pentium 4s were notorious for that. The other was the headphone jack failed in which Dell had to replace the motherboard on it. The disc drive failed, battery failed, and hard drive failed all during Warranty too. Towards the end of life it started to develop a line down the screen. I do still own this laptop but haven’t turned it on in years. This laptop forced me to go to apple. This is one I do not miss.
I saved an old Dell Inspiron 7500 from a school I work at. They were clearing out a bunch of old tech that has been hanging about in storage since the 90s and I asked if I could take that one. It's in pretty great cosmetic shape, but I need to get ahold of a power adapter before I can test it. Hoping it works. I'm interested in having a decent Windows 98 machine again for the first time in many years. If it's in working order, or I'm able to repair it if needed, I intend on swapping out the aging HDD for some compact flash storage. I will give it a good cleaning inside and out and will replace the thermal compound as well.
I actually owned one of these back in the day. It was my first laptop on my first days of uni and holy shit I gamed the HELL out of it until it hit the bucket. Incredible laptop, a but heavy, but still. So yeah, it IS a very capable retro gaming machine.
I made my old ThinkPad X60t a retro XP machine. Sure, it didn't ship with a beefy GPU but it runs all the games I played as a kid on 98 and XP just fine.
I happen to think buying a middle-man machine is the way to go. Something like your Thinkpad T420/430 or Dell Precision M4600/6600. They have great support for Windows 7 and older, meaning that running XP on them is relatively easy. Additionally, their I/O selection and even integrated graphics trounce anything available in 2003. For 4:3 gaming, you'll need to run at a funky resolution or go with an external monitor. But anything in widescreen would be easily supported.
Inspiron 5100 was my baby. Fantastic machine other than being a desktop Pentium 4 and containing the heat of the entire universe. Mine had the ATI Mobility Radeon 7500
This machine gives me good memory vibes from my Dell Inspiron 1520. How i was exited of this machine! Deep black mate finish outside, awesome keyboard with just enough movement, cold enough. Paired with Nvidia GeForce 8600M GT it was even able to run Crysis! Shame, what it was paired with TN matrix with 1280x800 pixels, if it only have an IPS screen that would be an ultimate machine. It served me well for a long time... It saw Windows XP, 7 and 8. I have tried Hackitosh with it and fall in love with OSX. This machine was maxed with RAM and replaced CPU (T55xx something), and at the some point of time even SSD was installed! It was end-up as my first FreeNAS server with built-in UPS :) Sadly, it was retired and placed in storage (my hands just can't sell it) and i never saw something so modular, flexible, balanced, upgradable as this machine anymore, but yeah, those days are gone...
Had the low spec Pentium 4 5150 with Wi-Fi and had nothing but trouble. Multiple motherboard issues that required replacement and terrible thermal issues. But was able to run Tycoon 3 impeccably when the stars aligned!
I got a Dell Inspiron 8600 around the same time period and was shocked that my 1.6ghz pentium M would outperform my friend's 2.8ghz Pentium 4 in many cases. I also had the Geforce GO 4200TI which was able to beat most of the FX5000 laptop series and some of the low end 6000 series nvidia gpu's. Oddly many years later however i picked up the same model Dell with a 3.2ghz pentium 4 and Radeon 9600 pro ultra (512MB) and it really rips. All in all the FX5200 was a pretty poor performer and i expected that it would struggle. Thanks for the video and the memories that flowed back from it.
Fun fact: it’s funny that you tried to run Crysis because this laptop was bundled with Far Cry 1 and could barely handle that. This was my first gaming laptop and I used to play games like Counter Strike, Max Payne 2, Rainbow Six (can’t remember which version), Battlefield 2. I think Half Life 2 was the ceiling before I wanted to get a more powerful laptop
I used to have the 5100. amazed that i was able to upgrade the GPU to a Radeon 9200 64MB, and it ran everything I could throw at it. Max Payne 2 was the last game i played on it before moving it on
The other day I managed to grab an Acer Ferrari 3200, also from 2003, in good condition for quite a low price (about $ 20), an excellent machine for games of those years.
I purchased my first laptop around this time but due to budget constraints went with a Toshiba Satellite with an AMD processor. It was, umm, adequate. The Dell you reviewed is a much nicer machine.
the 5100 is also a good option since it can take 5150 video cards. it also has desktop pentium 4 cpus which are significantly faster than the pentium 4-m chips
I had a Dell Inspiron 9100 back in the early mid 2000s it rocked as a gaming system. You could upgrade the CPU and gpu to meet the specs of the best alienware laptops of the era. I currently have a Dell Studio 1735 I am setting up for my old library of 90s and 2000s games. I did build a modern system by Xp standards, amd fx build with a 750TI gpu, but for the reasons mentioned here, I installed a modern OS and sold it. I decided a Laptop will be the better option. Anything too modern/demanding will likely run on my main gaming rig anyway.
There was a class action lawsuit over the 5150 and 5160. There were serious issues with the design of the board, including where the heat from the CPU could cause the connection to the power plug to crack. I lost four motherboards to this between 2005 and 2007. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lundell_Settlement
Ha, well timed Colin! I just bought an XPS600 desktop today for 20 bucks, turned out to have 2x GTX 7800's in SLI but a poopy Pentium D, folks say it won't take a C2D but I'll try. Need to change a few caps but at least it still runs.
To make things even more confusing, the Pentium 4M was actually based on a Pentium 3 because it was more efficient. That’s also the reason why the original Core processors were P3-based. The P4s were way too hot and power-hungry.
Not a Dell fan but this isn't the worst laptop I have seen. One thing for sure 256MB with XP is swap file city if you do anything more then read documents. 512MB at a minimum is needed to avoid that. Especially true after they added all the Service Packs and updates turning it into a slug with not enough RAM.
Q3 runs on my K6-2 550, with an MX460 that game is incredibly well optimized, and requires very little from the CPU other games of that era not this forgiving, sadly
actually that one would be perfect for Windows 98. For XP I'd get something more modern from the Vista era like a core2duo and a Geforce 8600GT or 9600GT. Dell Vostro 1500 is a great one to look at.
I've had a couple of these - they suffer from VRM issues. I'd advise cleaning it out regularly and applying fresh thermal paste. Frankly there are far better options for old XP laptops like the Inspiron 6400 and 9400, for example.
The Intel Pentium M rather was a heavily modified Pentium III to save energy for notebooks. So basically all "Intel Centrino" laptops were in fact Intel Pentium III machines, just with a new plate name with the Intel 915 chipset and an intel wifi card.
I found a 5150 for $30 at a thrift store recently. my laptop has similar specs other than having a WiFi card and also a 2GB ram upgrade I installed. It runs very well for a Windows XP era laptop. Well worth what I paid for it.
I had an FX 5200 Ultra AGP back around that time and from what I remember, all but the most powerful FX cards (5800 and 5900) were absolutely terrible at running both DX9 and DX10 games, despite being supposedly DX10 capable GPU's. I'm not surprised that it refused to run Crysis at all and performed so terribly in other games at that high a resolution. Nvidia wasn't able to really sort that issue out until the 6xxx series GPU's. The 6600GT in particular was a huge rebound for Nvidia.
I just bought a Windows XP laptop on eBay, I wanted one from this era as I only used XP desktops growing up. Ending up buying an HP Pavilion ZD8000, a 17" beast of a "laptop" with a desktop P4 3Ghz and a radeon x600. Weaker than my HD 2600 Pro in my desktop but can run older games at native 1440x900 or newer games like Half-Life 2 and Far Cry at reduced res. It can even run Doom 3 at playable framerates at 800x600. Would love to put a P4 3.8Ghz in it but those things are like $150 on eBay, no way.
just had to pop my head into the storage closet in the next room, i still have an almost mint INSPIRON 8600 in there, just loved it so much, i remember playing mostly the orroginal FARCRY on it, half life 2, command and conquer generals, it was as i recall a very expensive laptop circa 2004 maybe ? it was a graduation gift from dad, i still have it since it has sentimental value for me.
7:20 Pentium m is not only for battery life, it's have better performance then pentium 4 even on desktop. You can try to find rare matherboard with 479 socket for Pentium m and compare with P4. Or just watch test on internet. That why Pentium m became a Intel core platform.
I had the inspiron 5100 model years ago with the desktop pentium 4, it was a great machine with good performance but it was running quite hot since it had an desktop cpu. Other than that i pretty liked the design and the aesthetic of the laptop because it looked like it came straight from the early 2000s, and also another surprise was that its original battery was still working, Sadly the display went bad so i took it off and used it as a desktop but after a while it started to malfunction and started to fall apart so i sadly had to salvage the stuff that were still good and scrap the rest of it.
First pc I ever built with my own money had a fx5500 gpu, and that card was horrible, it ran halo horribly and other games didn't run well either. I can't even imagine a 5200. I later got a laptop with a Centrino cpu with a nvidia 6600 and it hung with many of my friends desktops.
These laptops had excellent 2D acceleration taken advantage of by programs such as GIMP and Photoshop, making them excellent machines for digital drawing.
Even if these types of laptops aren’t super powerful, at least you can actually upgrade or swap out components with little to no effort. Especially the battery!
I still keep my old Alienware M5750 around for XP gaming. A bit newer being bought by me in 2006, but it came with XP and a Core 2 Duo. Also has a discrete "mxm" graphics card (they worked out a standard by then) which was upgraded from an ATI X1800 to an AMD HD4850
I remember doing various Windows XP re-installs and upgrades to these from my first job back in the day - interestingly they never bought the Latitude line. Funny, I can't recall the odd Windows key placement on the keyboard!
I recently picked up a Dell Latitude C840 with a 2.4ghz P4M to run windows 98SE, it absolutely flies running it but getting it setup to run Win98SE was a bit of a challenge since Dell had committed that generation of machines to only run Win2K or WinXP by that time.
I’m a huge fan of laptops from this era. Not only for nostalgia reasons, since this is what I grew up with, but also since it was a golden age of laptop upgradability. I’ve got a few ThinkPads and Compaqs of the era, and they’re great machines.
Yeah, pretty much everything had socketed cpu's.
The reverse of today.... Absolutely everything was socketed, modular batteries, sometimes dual battery capable.
yeah, laptops back then were modular pretty easy to upgrade and service
now everything is fixed soldered and unupgradeable
No doubt people don't understand their smartphones tech is fitted in with the increasing power and performance of laptops. Asus and Razer are the masters.
In my work and study of vintage computers over the past few years, I have consistently been impressed with Dell’s designs, quality, and continued legacy support. Well done, Dell team!
this might be the first retro computer that i’ve seen on youtube that i actually have. used it a lot when i was a kid and ended up inheriting it from my dad. sure, it’s definitely worse for wear but certainly still usable. remember playing rollercoaster tycoon 3 on it and it handling it pretty damn well.
Wonder how Windows 7 would perform on it. Have you tried it by chance?
@@dylanash2569 I haven't tried it, but I can't imagine it would be too great, seeing as I tried running Minecraft on it back in 2013 and I got maybe 10 FPS on it. It wasn't really playable and I imagine that things such as Aero just wouldn't work and Windows 7 era games would probably choke. Still have it, suppose I could give it a shot. Main limitation is that it's a 32-bit CPU
@@majoryoshi I ask cause I used to run 7 decently well on an AMD Turion and while performance wasnt great in many games, it worked well as an office machine.
The Windows XP retro gaming scene is going to be an interesting one, because XP was supported for so long up to Windows 7 and even beyond into 2015. The poor reception of Vista really prolonged it's lifespan.
I currently have XP set up on my 2011 Thinkpad T420, one of the last laptop generations to have native support for the OS.
Does it have the nVidia GPU? I've got a T430 with the nVidia, now I'm curious if it is XP compatible.
@@milescarter7803 no, just the standard Intel one. Don't expect that model to do high end XP gaming. It seems to be most comfortable at 720p at Medium settings with games like CoD 2 and Battlefront II. It only really starts to struggle with Battlefield 2.
not only that, it's POS version was supported up until 2019
@@milescarter7803You can play pre vista era games on it. XP is fully supported till 3rd generation intel core processors. You can search drivers online.
I absolutely love these types of videos. I have many XP era laptops loaded down with games. Also if you want a more modern laptop that's very small, with hours of battery life while playing, I recommend the Dell Latitude 3189. You can get them under $100, they have windows 11, and are on par gaming and benchmark wise with an ATi 9800pro. I put a usb external SSD on that sucker and loaded it down with all my GOG games. It is a great pre 2004 gaming pc( an era that has a lot of nostalgia for me as that was my teens and early adulthood). Great for all those unreal engine 2 games and below. Handles dosbox great too. Resolution of the screen is 1366x768, so a lot of these games will run at 1024x768 or you can use widescreen mods. Also a glide wrapper like DgVoodoo will get those glide games running just great. This little hunk of junk is great for travel, it's light, and you can game on the battery for at least 3 hours. I did it playing Deus Ex and Gothic 2. It's a great option for the retro pc user that needs a little pc for travel that can browse the web safely.
I had a machine from this family growing up... It feels weird to think of it as retro tech, but at the same time exciting to see coverage of something so niche that also connects with me on a deeply personal level.
Thank you for this!
We had a load of these at a company I was working at around 2004/2005. They were not really corporate laptops and so they failure rate was bad, every single one needed a motherboard replacement. I was told they were more of a home machine or gaming machine, more cutting edge specs and more heat as a result.
They suffered from VRM failures most of the time which was common with half-assed Pentium 4 Desktop Replacements like the Inspiron 5150.
In fairness, the Dell corporate laptops of the era got clogged quickly with hair and dander, overheated and died. I even had a few of the 2006-2007 era with dead motherboards right out of the box.
I have hung on to a few Dell mobile workstations of the era, but the keyboards are missing keys... They do fly with XP though
I think you're glossing over what a weird thing the P4 was here, especially crammed into a laptop. The Pentium M chips of that time would have performed similarly if not better, and so it's weird to me how Intel was pushing P4 chips into laptops, creating unnecessary internal competition with a CPU that didn't perform like they intended. P4 chips were an evolutionary dead end. Intel had to go back to the Pentium M, which was based entirely on the Pentium 3, to start making good CPUs again - the Core line we know til this day. It's like Intel was hungover from drinking all that megaherz koolaid in the 90s, gaslighting themselves into believing a 3ghz P4 made sense when a lower clocked Pentium M would've outperformed it and drawn less power doing it. The IBM Thinkpad T42 with Pentium M and Radeon 9600 was a far better machine for gaming, and it should have been for sale around the same time.
I don't know if I'd call anything with an FX 5200 a "lucky find", but I admit there was much worse in the laptop world back then, and even having a discrete GPU in a laptop back then was uncommon. But you were definitely limited to very old games on that card, even by 2003 standards.
I have a pristine Dell M1710 that I obtained from my work and it's a beast at circa 2007 gaming! It has 32 bit Windows XP SP3.
ah, what an absolutely miserable machine. P4 laptops were truly the worst of every world: hot, slow, expensive, and left so immediately in the dust by every class of new machine that you wondered why you bothered in the first place. comparing this to my first Vista laptop (an Acer Aspire, lmfao) was night and day even then. the only thing i miss is the keyboard!
You should check out the Inspiron 9100, the 5150s big brother with a desktop chip and very similar design language using the same colors and style.
This video's definitely a Nostalgia trip for me, thank you for uploading this! I had the 5150 Brand New when I started College, (later on I was also given the 5100, which is a celeron-based processor variant) I'll tell you one thing though, the laptop doesn't age well; repeated RMA's to Dell Tech Support, due to various components failing, (Motherboard, Power Supply, Power Jack, Hard Drive, Battery, etc.) just about everything's failed on the laptop and had to be replaced, even several times! But, as a daily driver for Years, that laptop served me well! (and yes, I did carry the hefty laptop+power supply with me everywhere, it wasn't easy! 😂)
We had the same experience, for some reason they were bought for use by our consultants who were doing database work on them, building cubes (Microsoft Analysis Services) etc, so they had a hard life.
The 5100, 5150, & 5160 had SO MANY design flaws that I'd hazard a guess that any that have survived intact this far have either been repaired, or are time bombs waiting to go off.
I had a 5150 as my daily driver from 2004 through 2010, and as my portable until 2011 when it got replaced with a Cr-48. I got lucky - I had the extended service warranty at the time so I didn't have to pay for the three motherboards and four power supplies that failed.
I'm a bit disappointed that this particular model was used, because I expect there are a lot of people who might get one, only for one of the many issues to crop up on them.
Yep mine would over heat constantly. The fan failed headphone jack failed, battery failed, disc drive failed, hard drive failed all under warranty too. By the end I was left with a fully refurbished laptop which is why it lasted so long.
Don't forget you can plug in a USB hub, keyboard, mouse and VGA monitor still. You then can use any resolution you want for gaming. I think this is an excellent option
I love the music you chose for your videos. I also love the content. Makes me nostalgic of my childhood xp experience.
I remember I bought a new HP Pavillion desktop PC in 2003. I was really impressed with XP's stability; it just worked. The Win98 SE box it replaced was crash-y, especially with USB devices.
I bought a Dell Inspiron 5100 about a year ago and did all of the things no one in their right mind would do. I used it for modern day tasks with Windows xp. Even though it was slow more often than not, it still managed to be usable.
I have lived long enough to see XP now considered interesting to retrophiles. I think it's time to check out.
"Dude you're getting a Dell!" Perfect ending!!
Thanks for this glimpse into WinXP gaming laptop era. My personal preference is Toshiba Satellite 5205-705. It’s a Pentium 4 machine with GeForce 5600go, gorgeous 1600x1200 screen and rich Yamaha sound powered by two speakers and subwoofer. The screen is really good even by today standards, and gpu is capable of running most pre-2004 year games. Plus Yamaha chip helps running dos games (under win 98) with general midi music.
I just had mine arrive yesterday for my retro laptop collection. I had it's identical cousin growing up (1100) and I remember this model being one of the famous lawsuit models. One overheated frequently and the other could catch fire if I remember correctly.
One of these old chunks of metal was my first computer ever. It was a different model though. A Latitude D630 from 2007 that came with Windows Vista Business installed on it that was a hand me down from our neighbors. When I got my hands on it, it ran windows 7 professional. Then, I upgraded it to windows 10 32 bit. I tried installing 64 bit windows 10 on it, but it struggled on it, so I went with Linux.
You can run windows xp very well on it. With just 3 GB RAM it flies like anything.
I came across a number of these Inspirons and in fact had one that had broken barrel charging ports. Don't miss them at all.
Have a dedicated core 2 quad 9550 win XP machine. Works like a dream ( build it a couple of years ego ).
Just upgraded a core2duo system to this same exact c2q cpu of which you speak.. quite frankly I'd have to agree
This was the first "new" PC I got, when starting college in 2003. They have a design defect where if the backlight is at anything but full brightness, and anything else draws power (eg, the hard disk seeking) the backlight flickers. Dell replaced the video card, the motherboard, the display, then the whole machine. Then on machine #2 they did the video card, the video card again, the motherboard, the display, then the whole machine. By this point the 5150 wasn't made anymore, and they gave me a 9600. I was able to talk them into swapping it for a 600m - the first Centrino / Pentium M laptop from Dell. It was a fantastic machine and I used it for many years!
I'd love another 600m, but I don't really want another 5150...
I had this exact Laptop back in High School. Used it for a few years.
My grandma bought me this exact laptop back in 2004-ish. I remember building it on Dell's website which was so cool back then. I made sure it had built in 802.11g wifi. It had a problem with the DC jack when I sold it. Memories!!!
I have one similar the 9100 Inspiron, but my hinges were super stiff and broke recently, but I still kept all the stuff until I can fix them, love your videos Colin
From what I read, Windows XP will support NVidia graphics up to Maxwell, but Optimus support requires Windows 7 or later. So the highest performing Windows XP laptop would be a vista-era gaming laptop.
I have a Dell Inspiron 510m which is very similar to the one in the video. I was attracted to the blue and silver color scheme. I originally bought it to use as a retro machine but so far haven't got round to it. For a while I preferred the Dell Latitude D430 as an XP machine as it's smaller and lighter, not to mention more powerful and with a more modern selection of slots and ports.
Thanks for the trip down memory lane. This was my first laptop back in college, and was used for 3D animation. That thing was huge, and heavy! The Pentium 4 at the time was a beast, especially when it came to the heat that machine put out. When rendering, I'd always have it propped up to let more air through.
This brings back some memories. The ultimate lap warmer.
I still have a fully functional Gateway M500s from the same era. It had a unique (for the era) widescreen and media control setup, with a modestly impressive speaker set with subwoofer built-in. I’m going to dig the machine out and clean it up, maybe drop in solid state storage, but it’s an incredible gaming machine for the era … at least as a portable DOS and even limited console/arcade machine emulation (which is exactly what the machine did when I wasn’t doing work on it). I used to play everything through N64/PlayStation without issue on the mobile Pentium 4. Great stuff!
I've always wanted a Falcon Northwest Fragbook from the Windows XP era, but considering the pain I went through of using a Dell Latitude from 2005 (arguably NOT a gaming laptop), I think I would pass based mainly of having to put up with a main HDD with the antiquated 44-pin IDE/PATA interface when the newer and more common SATA were just becoming a thing. Sure, nowadays I _could_ just get an mSATA to PATA adapter and run off SSD, but it doesn't seem practical for just a retro gaming machine that I don't exactly use every day.
My uncle had that laptop! It was a good desktop replacement, since he replaced his desktop with that laptop! Also he had some games installed like Halo 1, Black and White, Warcraft, The Oregon Trail the 4th Edition, and Diablo II on his computer!
Wow, my dad had damn near the exact same setup back then, but I believe his had the Radeon. Either way, really cool to see one of these again.
Got a Dell Inspiron 8600, running a Pentium-M 1.5ghz, GF Go FX5200 64MB video, 80GB IDE HD, and I've upgraded it to 1.5GB of RAM. I threw all the old games (CivII, NfS I, II, III, and many more) on it. Great old machine.
I actually found one of these at a goodwill for 5$ a few years back. Fixed it up nicely.
This brings back good memories from childhood, my first laptop was a Dell Inspiron 500M.
I take it personally when Win XP and the early 2000's are described as retro
My moms old work laptop. So many memories on pc games, flash, early 2000's internet and club penguin
I think i have one of these in the garage from my mother in laws office. I preferred a Thinkpad over it. But fun to see this in the spotlight, I'll have to pull it out and see which one runs better!
woooow we had this one back in the day, my dad bought it for his work. oh those memories!
in 2009 i bought a samsung r560 with my own money - a laptop with a bluray drive! in 2009! still have that thing lying around somewhere... had drive broke.
I really miss the 00s era of laptops.. Modular, Stylish, easily repairable and durable.
Till companies got a wif of greed and more money
I had this laptop back in the day. Looks like the same specs too. It wasn't bad but I wound up using an older P3 laptop for......mobile.... things. Working on my car during a hot summer with this thing on my leg connected to the odb II port was painful. Also because of the CPU the battery life was terrible. Running games though, you didn't need a heater in the room, it blew hot air like a hair dryer.
I really appreciate you using both metric and imperial system of measurements when talking about weight and dimensions. Too often am I annoyed at English-speaking youtubers not realizing they're using an international language
I had this laptop in college. I bought it new in 2004. I used it up until 2012 and upgraded it to 4gb of ram. I actually had a lot of issues with it, one being that this laptop would constantly overheat, pentium 4s were notorious for that. The other was the headphone jack failed in which Dell had to replace the motherboard on it. The disc drive failed, battery failed, and hard drive failed all during Warranty too. Towards the end of life it started to develop a line down the screen. I do still own this laptop but haven’t turned it on in years. This laptop forced me to go to apple. This is one I do not miss.
You are my new favorite techtuber. The amount of tech nostalgia hits me hard in the feels
I saved an old Dell Inspiron 7500 from a school I work at. They were clearing out a bunch of old tech that has been hanging about in storage since the 90s and I asked if I could take that one. It's in pretty great cosmetic shape, but I need to get ahold of a power adapter before I can test it.
Hoping it works. I'm interested in having a decent Windows 98 machine again for the first time in many years. If it's in working order, or I'm able to repair it if needed, I intend on swapping out the aging HDD for some compact flash storage. I will give it a good cleaning inside and out and will replace the thermal compound as well.
I actually owned one of these back in the day. It was my first laptop on my first days of uni and holy shit I gamed the HELL out of it until it hit the bucket. Incredible laptop, a but heavy, but still. So yeah, it IS a very capable retro gaming machine.
People overlook another great xp machine for some old school xp gaming and fun the hp tc1100
I made my old ThinkPad X60t a retro XP machine.
Sure, it didn't ship with a beefy GPU but it runs all the games I played as a kid on 98 and XP just fine.
I never thought you would review my exact same machine! 😅
I happen to think buying a middle-man machine is the way to go. Something like your Thinkpad T420/430 or Dell Precision M4600/6600. They have great support for Windows 7 and older, meaning that running XP on them is relatively easy. Additionally, their I/O selection and even integrated graphics trounce anything available in 2003.
For 4:3 gaming, you'll need to run at a funky resolution or go with an external monitor. But anything in widescreen would be easily supported.
Inspiron 5100 was my baby. Fantastic machine other than being a desktop Pentium 4 and containing the heat of the entire universe.
Mine had the ATI Mobility Radeon 7500
This machine gives me good memory vibes from my Dell Inspiron 1520.
How i was exited of this machine! Deep black mate finish outside, awesome keyboard with just enough movement, cold enough. Paired with Nvidia GeForce 8600M GT it was even able to run Crysis!
Shame, what it was paired with TN matrix with 1280x800 pixels, if it only have an IPS screen that would be an ultimate machine.
It served me well for a long time...
It saw Windows XP, 7 and 8. I have tried Hackitosh with it and fall in love with OSX.
This machine was maxed with RAM and replaced CPU (T55xx something), and at the some point of time even SSD was installed!
It was end-up as my first FreeNAS server with built-in UPS :)
Sadly, it was retired and placed in storage (my hands just can't sell it) and i never saw something so modular, flexible, balanced, upgradable as this machine anymore, but yeah, those days are gone...
This gaming laptop is so interesting & unique with entirely fast-speed monitors.
Had the low spec Pentium 4 5150 with Wi-Fi and had nothing but trouble. Multiple motherboard issues that required replacement and terrible thermal issues. But was able to run Tycoon 3 impeccably when the stars aligned!
Haha, loved the ending on this one!
Funny, I was actually eyeing one of these on eBay! Decided against it though, since I already have a few Latitudes and Precisions of the era.
Miss the “hey how’s it going?” days
Dude, I had this laptop. I still have it, actually. I used to play Counter-Strike Source at lan parties with it. Awesome laptop.
hey colin...great work on everything your show offers...well documented ...well thought out presentation...
I got a Dell Inspiron 8600 around the same time period and was shocked that my 1.6ghz pentium M would outperform my friend's 2.8ghz Pentium 4 in many cases. I also had the Geforce GO 4200TI which was able to beat most of the FX5000 laptop series and some of the low end 6000 series nvidia gpu's. Oddly many years later however i picked up the same model Dell with a 3.2ghz pentium 4 and Radeon 9600 pro ultra (512MB) and it really rips.
All in all the FX5200 was a pretty poor performer and i expected that it would struggle.
Thanks for the video and the memories that flowed back from it.
Easily worst Nvidia product
Fun fact: it’s funny that you tried to run Crysis because this laptop was bundled with Far Cry 1 and could barely handle that. This was my first gaming laptop and I used to play games like Counter Strike, Max Payne 2, Rainbow Six (can’t remember which version), Battlefield 2. I think Half Life 2 was the ceiling before I wanted to get a more powerful laptop
I used to have the 5100. amazed that i was able to upgrade the GPU to a Radeon 9200 64MB, and it ran everything I could throw at it. Max Payne 2 was the last game i played on it before moving it on
The other day I managed to grab an Acer Ferrari 3200, also from 2003, in good condition for quite a low price (about $ 20), an excellent machine for games of those years.
I purchased my first laptop around this time but due to budget constraints went with a Toshiba Satellite with an AMD processor. It was, umm, adequate. The Dell you reviewed is a much nicer machine.
the 5100 is also a good option since it can take 5150 video cards. it also has desktop pentium 4 cpus which are significantly faster than the pentium 4-m chips
I had a Dell Inspiron 9100 back in the early mid 2000s it rocked as a gaming system. You could upgrade the CPU and gpu to meet the specs of the best alienware laptops of the era. I currently have a Dell Studio 1735 I am setting up for my old library of 90s and 2000s games. I did build a modern system by Xp standards, amd fx build with a 750TI gpu, but for the reasons mentioned here, I installed a modern OS and sold it. I decided a Laptop will be the better option. Anything too modern/demanding will likely run on my main gaming rig anyway.
There was a class action lawsuit over the 5150 and 5160. There were serious issues with the design of the board, including where the heat from the CPU could cause the connection to the power plug to crack. I lost four motherboards to this between 2005 and 2007.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lundell_Settlement
Ha, well timed Colin!
I just bought an XPS600 desktop today for 20 bucks, turned out to have 2x GTX 7800's in SLI but a poopy Pentium D, folks say it won't take a C2D but I'll try.
Need to change a few caps but at least it still runs.
To make things even more confusing, the Pentium 4M was actually based on a Pentium 3 because it was more efficient. That’s also the reason why the original Core processors were P3-based. The P4s were way too hot and power-hungry.
I had this laptop. it was notable for the low quality of the plastic. in 5 years of using it, it woke up in my hands literally
Not a Dell fan but this isn't the worst laptop I have seen. One thing for sure 256MB with XP is swap file city if you do anything more then read documents. 512MB at a minimum is needed to avoid that. Especially true after they added all the Service Packs and updates turning it into a slug with not enough RAM.
I absolutely love your videos!
Why we can't do something like that now? I mean, with easy access to ram/ssd/cooling system/battery. What sense to make laptops thinner and thinner
Q3 runs on my K6-2 550, with an MX460
that game is incredibly well optimized, and requires very little from the CPU
other games of that era not this forgiving, sadly
actually that one would be perfect for Windows 98.
For XP I'd get something more modern from the Vista era like a core2duo and a Geforce 8600GT or 9600GT.
Dell Vostro 1500 is a great one to look at.
I've had a couple of these - they suffer from VRM issues. I'd advise cleaning it out regularly and applying fresh thermal paste. Frankly there are far better options for old XP laptops like the Inspiron 6400 and 9400, for example.
Never heard of XP gaming until now
The Intel Pentium M rather was a heavily modified Pentium III to save energy for notebooks. So basically all "Intel Centrino" laptops were in fact Intel Pentium III machines, just with a new plate name with the Intel 915 chipset and an intel wifi card.
I found a 5150 for $30 at a thrift store recently. my laptop has similar specs other than having a WiFi card and also a 2GB ram upgrade I installed. It runs very well for a Windows XP era laptop. Well worth what I paid for it.
The 5150 insane laptop
I had an FX 5200 Ultra AGP back around that time and from what I remember, all but the most powerful FX cards (5800 and 5900) were absolutely terrible at running both DX9 and DX10 games, despite being supposedly DX10 capable GPU's. I'm not surprised that it refused to run Crysis at all and performed so terribly in other games at that high a resolution. Nvidia wasn't able to really sort that issue out until the 6xxx series GPU's. The 6600GT in particular was a huge rebound for Nvidia.
Also D series lineup were beasts.
I just bought a Windows XP laptop on eBay, I wanted one from this era as I only used XP desktops growing up. Ending up buying an HP Pavilion ZD8000, a 17" beast of a "laptop" with a desktop P4 3Ghz and a radeon x600. Weaker than my HD 2600 Pro in my desktop but can run older games at native 1440x900 or newer games like Half-Life 2 and Far Cry at reduced res. It can even run Doom 3 at playable framerates at 800x600. Would love to put a P4 3.8Ghz in it but those things are like $150 on eBay, no way.
just had to pop my head into the storage closet in the next room, i still have an almost mint INSPIRON 8600 in there, just loved it so much, i remember playing mostly the orroginal FARCRY on it, half life 2, command and conquer generals, it was as i recall a very expensive laptop circa 2004 maybe ? it was a graduation gift from dad, i still have it since it has sentimental value for me.
I remember that Dell commercial goober. lol
7:20 Pentium m is not only for battery life, it's have better performance then pentium 4 even on desktop. You can try to find rare matherboard with 479 socket for Pentium m and compare with P4. Or just watch test on internet. That why Pentium m became a Intel core platform.
I had the inspiron 5100 model years ago with the desktop pentium 4, it was a great machine with good performance but it was running quite hot since it had an desktop cpu.
Other than that i pretty liked the design and the aesthetic of the laptop because it looked like it came straight from the early 2000s, and also another surprise was that its original battery was still working,
Sadly the display went bad so i took it off and used it as a desktop but after a while it started to malfunction and started to fall apart so i sadly had to salvage the stuff that were still good and scrap the rest of it.
First pc I ever built with my own money had a fx5500 gpu, and that card was horrible, it ran halo horribly and other games didn't run well either. I can't even imagine a 5200. I later got a laptop with a Centrino cpu with a nvidia 6600 and it hung with many of my friends desktops.
These laptops had excellent 2D acceleration taken advantage of by programs such as GIMP and Photoshop, making them excellent machines for digital drawing.
This XP laptop looks interesting. :)
Even if these types of laptops aren’t super powerful, at least you can actually upgrade or swap out components with little to no effort. Especially the battery!
I still keep my old Alienware M5750 around for XP gaming. A bit newer being bought by me in 2006, but it came with XP and a Core 2 Duo. Also has a discrete "mxm" graphics card (they worked out a standard by then) which was upgraded from an ATI X1800 to an AMD HD4850
For XP gamind laptop I use Fujitsu-Siemens Celsius H240 with C2D CPU and ATI FireGL V5200 video card, it just rocks.
I remember doing various Windows XP re-installs and upgrades to these from my first job back in the day - interestingly they never bought the Latitude line. Funny, I can't recall the odd Windows key placement on the keyboard!
I recently picked up a Dell Latitude C840 with a 2.4ghz P4M to run windows 98SE, it absolutely flies running it but getting it setup to run Win98SE was a bit of a challenge since Dell had committed that generation of machines to only run Win2K or WinXP by that time.
i use an T60p for windows xp gaming with an core 2 duo 2gb ram and a 256mb fire gl 5200 graphics