Rd's latest Latitude

[ratdude747]

Today I bought a Dell latitude D800 to replace my dad's dead netbook (or my D400).

For $50, I got:

-pentium M 1.7GHz
-640mb Ram
-nvidia geforce 4 32mb GPU
- newer OEM 80WHr battery (less than 20% wear, replaced a stock sony)
-no HDD, had the complete caddy
- combo drive
- included PA-10 brick
- minus a couple of minor scuffs, its in great shape.
- dell says that it has a broadcom B/G/A card.

It also has a stupid admin password on the Bios... I'll fix that when I get home.


Everything seems to work on it... how did I do?

[brethin]

Re: Rd's latest Latitude

I would have stayed away from the Nvidia video. I would have spent $25 more and got a D820 with a Core 2 Duo and intel graphics.

[Topcat]

Re: Rd's latest Latitude

^
I think the GF4 was prior to the undefill issue, so I don't think it'll end with graphics issues.

Its gonna be slow, but it'll be a fine web browser.,

[ratdude747]

Re: Rd's latest Latitude

I would have stayed away from the Nvidia video. I would have spent $25 more and got a D820 with a Core 2 Duo and intel graphics.

The place didn't have that... It was bought in person at purdue university's surplus store.

IIRC that old of an Nvidia chip has the problem.

[Uranium-235]

Re: Rd's latest Latitude

better than my dv1000 intel 915g graphics.

except I got this for free

hehe

[ratdude747]

Re: Rd's latest Latitude

better than my dv1000 intel 915g graphics.

except I got this for free

hehe

My last free one was toast... same vintage, an HP NC6000.

[c_hegge]

Re: Rd's latest Latitude

Nice. The GF4 GPUs don't have the underfill issue (and I don't think they had RoHS solder issues either), so it should be fine.

I also scored myself a Dell (see the scores thread), but it has more problems than a missing HDD.

[ratdude747]

Re: Rd's latest Latitude

I love how the main fan is a removable module via 2 screws... easiest HS cleaning EVER (unlike the "clean the fan" video). There was a dust carpet in there... There is a second fan and HS for the GPU; I also cleaned that (it was pretty clean).

Popped in my 60b Hitachi drive... installing debian testing ATM (for testing).

So far, I am pretty impressed with the design and quality... on the long trek home, After getting it to 90%+ charge, I let it drain w/o the HDD via the BIOS page... it went for about 2.5 Hr. Sounds like a decent battery (since it has a reserve batt, It can warm swap batteries too).

I may upgrade the RAM and CPU down the road... It seems to have potential.

[smason]

Re: Rd's latest Latitude

The D800 is a workhorse. We had about 60 of them at work, very few problems.
Absolutely no issues with Nvidia on those.
Pretty slow by today's standards, not sure it's worth spending money on.
I gave away my last 2, and the 810s. Just 830s at home now.

[ratdude747]

Re: Rd's latest Latitude

The screen is higher res than I thought... 1680 x 1050. Even bigger than my D630's screen.

Still working on getting rid of that admin BIOS password, any free suggestions? (service tag is C3NGW31)

edit- it seems that that the volume down button is busted.

[gilly1984]

Re: Rd's latest Latitude

The screen is higher res than I thought... 1680 x 1050. Even bigger than my D630's screen.

Still working on getting rid of that admin BIOS password, any free suggestions? (service tag is C3NGW31)

edit- it seems that that the volume down button is busted.

I had a d630 with bios password on it. I had to download a program called "latitude.exe" and enter the service tag into it, it then gave me the master password.

[gilly1984]

Re: Rd's latest Latitude

Try this, its what i used i think.

[ratdude747]

Re: Rd's latest Latitude

Try this, its what i used i think.

You rock! Worked great. I had found a similar tool but it was useless.

[momaka]

Re: Rd's latest Latitude

Its gonna be slow, but it'll be a fine web browser.,

Meh.
I'm still using my Dell Latitude C600 which has a 850 MHz Pentium 3 and I don't find it slow at all - not for web browsing at least. Games, Youtube, and flash-heavy websites aside, it works much much faster than all of my friends' latest Core i3's and i5's when doing simple tasks such as web browsing and word processing (of course, I keep it nice and clean, that's why).

Last month I actually had to downgrade to 384 MB of RAM (had 512 MB originally) so that I could upgrade my uncle's laptop (which is same as mine but had only 256 MB or RAM).

Anyways. My point is, if kept clean, that D800 should be quite decent. Good score for $50, especially with that battery.

[c_hegge]

Re: Rd's latest Latitude

^
Agreed. My last laptop was a Toshiba Portege M300, which was a Pentium M 1.2GHz ULV, and it did fine as a word processor.

[Wester547]

Re: Rd's latest Latitude

Meh.
I'm still using my Dell Latitude C600 which has a 850 MHz Pentium 3 and I don't find it slow at all - not for web browsing at least. Games, Youtube, and flash-heavy websites aside, it works much much faster than all of my friends' latest Core i3's and i5's when doing simple tasks such as web browsing and word processing (of course, I keep it nice and clean, that's why).

Last month I actually had to downgrade to 384 MB of RAM (had 512 MB originally) so that I could upgrade my uncle's laptop (which is same as mine but had only 256 MB or RAM).

Anyways. My point is, if kept clean, that D800 should be quite decent. Good score for $50, especially with that battery.

It might be because if I'm not mistaken, the mobile Pentium IIIs were rather fast for their timeframe (being based on Celeron architecture), probably significantly faster than the older, Coppermine Desktop Pentium IIIs, even, for an onset of reasons. An old 1GHz Pentium III Coppermine I had with 512MB of PC700 (non-ECC) RDRAM and a 120GB Seagate 7200.7 PATA drive (originally a Dell XPS B1000 from 2000) could not browse the internet at comfortable speeds (even with relatively basic activity, with nothing but that which is required to run XP Home SP3 in the background, including no Anti-virus app), but otherwise was fairly fast in older apps.

But Ratdude's Latitude is nice, I would say. That GF4 is a solid graphics chip and anything that is GeForce FX and before is prior to the underfill issue (though even many of the GF4 chips were far superior to the GFFX chips in terms of performance in 3D apps). The GF4 is leaded solder so the BGA chip "losing contact" is the only thing you'd have to worry about but I'm sure it can take droves of stress before that happens.

[momaka]

Re: Rd's latest Latitude

The GF4 is leaded solder so the BGA chip "losing contact" is the only thing you'd have to worry about but I'm sure it can take droves of stress before that happens.

Indeed.
My C600 gets burning hot on the bottom - not just under the CPU but the entire bottom. Starts eventually smelling like burning plastic too. Yet that thing is close to 12 years old. When I first got that laptop I though the fans were malfunctioning. - Nope, it just likes to run hot.
Leaded solder FTW!

It might be because if I'm not mistaken, the mobile Pentium IIIs were rather fast for their timeframe (being based on Celeron architecture), probably significantly faster than the older, Coppermine Desktop Pentium IIIs, even, for an onset of reasons.

I don't know about that, but I do know that the graphics card makes a lot of a difference in terms of speed. I have also several T21 ThinkPads with same or very similar processors as my C600. All run like crap compared to the C600 since they all have S3 Savage (4??) video card with 2 MB or 4 MB. The C600 has ATI M3 with 8 MB. Makes a huge difference in web browsing, especially with Firefox.

I wonder how well that GF4 card in RD's laptop does in terms of 3D. I think it may even play some old games just fine (Counter-Strike 1.5/1.6/CZ at the very least I'm sure). I'd benchmark it just for fun.

[ratdude747]

Re: Rd's latest Latitude

The stock GPU for the series was actually a GeForce5. The GPU is modular, so It could be upgraded.

Right now the Lack of RAM is the worst issue... Anybody have some spare Laptop DDR?

[Wester547]

Re: Rd's latest Latitude

A GeForce 5/FX is still leaded solder and pre-bumpgate issues so it should be fine. Pretty awesome that it can be upgraded, though, not every laptop has that luxury.

I don't know about that, but I do know that the graphics card makes a lot of a difference in terms of speed. I have also several T21 ThinkPads with same or very similar processors as my C600. All run like crap compared to the C600 since they all have S3 Savage (4??) video card with 2 MB or 4 MB. The C600 has ATI M3 with 8 MB. Makes a huge difference in web browsing, especially with Firefox.

Well, the Dell XPS B1000 I make reference to had a 64MB DDR GeForce 2 GTS (AGP 4x/2.0), which for its time was quite fast, so I'm sure that was more than fast enough for 2D activities.

I wonder how well that GF4 card in RD's laptop does in terms of 3D. I think it may even play some old games just fine (Counter-Strike 1.5/1.6/CZ at the very least I'm sure). I'd benchmark it just for fun.

Counter-Strike (that mod for the original Half-Life) runs on a modified version of GoldSrc/the first Quake engine, which is extremely lightweight and can even run smoothly (with OpenGL/1024x768/16-bit color, though it supports 32-bit color too) on a card as old and low tier as a Riva TNT 16MB.

[ratdude747]

Re: Rd's latest Latitude

In


I don't know about that, but I do know that the graphics card makes a lot of a difference in terms of speed. I have also several T21 ThinkPads with same or very similar processors as my C600. All run like crap compared to the C600 since they all have S3 Savage (4??) video card with 2 MB or 4 MB. The C600 has ATI M3 with 8 MB. Makes a huge difference in web browsing, especially with Firefox.

That explains why my dad's T22 doesn't seem to be worth the Wireless N card I paid $15 for it OT: the wireless card is a linksys G+ card that has an N chip. Generic Atheros drivers FTW!

I just finished some work on the D800... I fixed the broken volume button (dirty contacts) and fixed a rattle inside the lid (3 screen screws) and some loose hinges.

If I come across some PC2700 for it I will flash the BIOS to the one for the precision M60, which enables 333mhz RAM usage (it will only run 266, not even underclocked).