This is not a pentium 4 but a pentium M which is quite different. It's a bit like a pentium 3 on steroids which is actually more powerful clock for clock than a pentium 4.

I've got one laptop with this CPU and I'm running lubuntu. It's decent, a bit on the slow side, but it does the job. However I had to install some patch in order to make linux think that this CPU supports PAE because for some reasons the 32 bit version of linux won't install if the CPU doesn't support PAE mode (which is dumb in my opinion since I don't think that any pentium M laptop would support more than 2GB of ram). However I did that a few years ago so maybe now they changed that.

In function of which GPU the computer has, it might be a decent XP gaming laptop too. I had a Lifetec with a pentium M 1.7GHz and a radeon 9600m but sadly it died years ago 🙁 Now I have that Acer from 2005 wich originally came with a celeron M, but I upgraded it with the parts from the lifetec. However the GPU really sucks because it's the integrated intel chipset ... And worse, even though the chipset can support up to 64MB of VRAM (taken from the main memory), the BIOS is hardcoded to have only 16MB of VRAM ... Maybe I could patch it, but I don't know which value to change, and since I don't want to brick it I'm not getting into that.

However it might do a decent windows 98 laptop, who knows ?

I've installed 98SE successfully multiple times on various Thinkpad T40/41/42s. The only thing most likely that will not work is the WiFi, especially if it has Intel 2200

If you find an actual P4 laptop, you could use it to iron your shirts.

Anonymous Coward wrote:

If you find an actual P4 laptop, you could use it to iron your shirts.

This

To me, it falls a bit out of useable hardware. Unless it has a decent cooler and I need a writing tool.
Other than that, I would strip it down, and use the lcd panel for a nice project.
You can buy the correct interface board, to make an flatscreen monitor.

Other uses than might interrest you, when dealing with a P4 laptop is:

- Fileserver, using Linux and Samba.
- Early era XP games.
- Cheap "vogons" forum surfing machine.
- Munt emulator using WinXP and a MIDI-USB dongle.

Steam In-home streaming 😜

As others have said, Pentium M is not a Pentium 4. You could comfortably run Windows ME, Windows 2000 SP4 or Windows XP SP2 on a Thinkpad R51. I am posting from a Thinkpad T42 running Windows ME with the unofficial service pack actually.

First thing you'd want to do increase the RAM. If using WinME, go with 512MB. For Win2k or XP, max out the RAM, probably 2GB at most. Lenovo still has drivers for their older laptops on their site, but usually their driver support only covers Windows NT derivatives (2K, XP etc). In my signature is a link to Thinkpad T42 drivers for WinME, they might be of use to you.

You could technically use Windows 98SE, but it's hard to work with because it doesn't have USB Mass Storage support out of the box. Without that, it's tough even finishing the Win98SE install because often it won't have any drivers for your Pentium M chipset or CD/DVD drivers. If that doesn't end up happening, you'll still be without an easy way to load drivers into the laptop, unless maybe you have a floppy drive or something and can deliver the USB Mass Storage driver that way.

If you have an actual Pentium 4 laptop (which I do), although yes it's a great personal space heater, it's still a decent enough laptop as long as you don't run heavy tasks on it. My only beef these days with Pentium 4 is it just feels slow compared to the Pentium 3. Do not run Windows XP on a plain Pentium 4, that is pure torture. Bare minimum should be a Pentium D, which is a dual core P4. I recommend Windows 98SE, WinME and Win2K on a Pentium 4 laptop.

Anonymous Coward wrote:

If you find an actual P4 laptop, you could use it to iron your shirts.

🤣
I've got an actual P4 laptop--a Toshiba with a 3.06GHz Prescott w/ HT. Mint condition, not a speck of dust in the heatsinks. And yet, it still throttles to around 1.86GHz after more than 6 minutes of CPU benchmarking, which makes it near impossible to obtain accurate results. There's a reason why there aren't many P4 laptops left: spontaneous combustion.

leileilol wrote:

Steam In-home streaming 😜

If it's that old I doubt it would have a good enough wireless card or video processing capabilities powerful enough to handle that.

I have an old Helwett Packard ZD8000 with an actual intel 775 desktop socket inside of it. It has an massive radiator setup with 3 coolers. It runs hot, it is too slow for anything modern, but I find its uses in mapping for Half Life / Counter Strike 1.6 and playing Sega Genesis / SNES games. The processor I have in it is an Pentium 650.
It has a nice big monitor, but the whole thing is just too much. 180W PSU.

There are Mobile Pentium 4, Pentium 4-M and Pentium M CPUs. The latter are the true mobile chips, much better architecturally and power-wise, and are the ancestors of all modern mobile CPUs.

Mobile Pentium 4 are really just desktop Pentium 4's with SpeedStep support. They had 133(533)MHz FSB. The Pentium 4-M were somewhat resdesigned early Northwoods with 100(400)MHz FSB, but ran at a lower voltage of 1.2V, which reduced their TDP and power consumption. They also supported SpeedStep and would go down to 1.2GHz when idle (full speeds ranged from 1.4 to 2.6GHz).

The Pentium 4-M could thus be used in normal laptops, not just huge desktop replacements with super beefed coolers. Compare a Thinkpad T30/A31 to a Thinkpad G40/G41 for example.

Standard Def Steve wrote:

I've got an actual P4 laptop--a Toshiba with a 3.06GHz Prescott w/ HT. Mint condition, not a speck of dust in the heatsinks. And yet, it still throttles to around 1.86GHz after more than 6 minutes of CPU benchmarking, which makes it near impossible to obtain accurate results. There's a reason why there aren't many P4 laptops left: spontaneous combustion.

I have one of those too... bought it brand new in the mid-2000s. I've cleaned the heatsinks and replaced the thermal paste more times than I can remember and it still suffers the same throttling issues. The fan goes to 100% speed even while doing basic tasks... god, that machine really sucks.

Is it cold where you live, if so turn it on and rest your feet on it, you will never need socks agian, as they make great feet warmers

Back in 2006, I bought an HP DV6000. I bought the model with a Celeron instead of a Pentium-M, because of the heatissues alone.
It was a good laptop, running without any issues. If it can be downgraded to a 1.4/1.6ghz Celeron-M, then go for that.
I sold that laptop in fall of 2010, because I got another daily driver. (Dual core Celeron T3000).
It is an Acer Extensa 5235, and it is still running as my main system/daily driver.

I have a Thinkpad x32 (1.8GHz Pentium M, 2GB RAM, 16MB Radeon Mobility) that I use primarily for travel. It's really light weight, works well for web browsing, light gaming, and non-HD movies, and I don't worry too much about it getting lost or stolen. It also puts out far less heat than my i7 EliteBook!

I have it three OSes loaded on it: Ubuntu 12.04LTS, XP SP3, and DOS 6.22/Win3.11. To get version 12.04, Ubuntu had to be upgraded from 10.04 to get around the PAE requirement. It works well, but is sluggish. I will probably try replacing Ubuntu with Puppy or TinyCore to give it a little more pep and keep it up-to-date. XP is rock solid on it. DOS/Win3.11 was really for no reason other than to see if it would work. Win3.11 looks nice with a generic SVGA driver, but I never could get the audio to work (settled on a PC speaker driver).

Gaming on it is really not too bad if you know its limitations. The Radeon Mobility is really nice to have - I used a Glide wrapper to play through Klingon Honor Guard (Unreal 1 engine) with no issues. I also played through UT99, but I think I used OpenGL for that.

Anonymous Coward wrote:

If you find an actual P4 laptop, you could use it to iron your shirts.

I do have one, and I think you exaggerate 😀
I use it for retro gaming, but sometimes also for web browsing, coding, MS Word etc.
Although an attempt to encode a video in x265 on it was a mistake 😉

The main technical problem are the broken (loose) hinges, so I have to put something heavy behind to lean the screen against.
It used to have very good quality Harman/Kardon speakers, but they're ruined now.

Standard Def Steve wrote:

Anonymous Coward wrote:

If you find an actual P4 laptop, you could use it to iron your shirts.

🤣
I've got an actual P4 laptop--a Toshiba with a 3.06GHz Prescott w/ HT. Mint condition, not a speck of dust in the heatsinks. And yet, it still throttles to around 1.86GHz after more than 6 minutes of CPU benchmarking, which makes it near impossible to obtain accurate results. There's a reason why there aren't many P4 laptops left: spontaneous combustion.

"spontaneous combustion" more like China syndrome 😵

The athlon laptops from the same period were also truly horrendous.

Do you have the GMA900 or the Radeon X300? Those are the two available chips for that model.

Anywho, your laptop may be a prime choice for RTS and RPGs from that era. Think Baldies Gate, Planescape and NWN. Stick to 2D and simple DX6-7 3D and you'll be fine. The GMA900 generally trades blows with a TNT2 Ultra in my experience. The X300 should about match the original ATI Radeon 7500 if I recall. It's also worth noting the GMA900 DOES have Transform And Light, albeit in drivers (please note my benchmarks were with a 3.4ghz Northwood P4 and GPU performance will be affected by the CPU as such)

dr_st wrote:

There are Mobile Pentium 4, Pentium 4-M and Pentium M CPUs. The latter are the true mobile chips, much better architecturally and power-wise, and are the ancestors of all modern mobile CPUs.

Yeah I have a Dell Latitude C640 with a Pentium 4-M in it. I too have had to replace the heatsink paste for the CPU, even the conductive pads on the video chip and such. It does like to overheat and throttle down a lot, but it's decent enough all the same. I have another just like it that turns off by itself a lot, is it possible it go so hot that the CPU socket has become faulty?

ultimate386 wrote:

I have a Thinkpad x32 (1.8GHz Pentium M, 2GB RAM, 16MB Radeon Mobility) that I use primarily for travel. It's really light weight, works well for web browsing, light gaming, and non-HD movies, and I don't worry too much about it getting lost or stolen. It also puts out far less heat than my i7 EliteBook!

What kind of drive do you run your OSes from? 1.8" HDD? CF card? I have a CF card in my Thinkpad X40 running XP SP2 and recently it developed broken USB drivers, also installshield doesn't want to cooperate, can't even re-install the Intel USB drivers. I agree that Thinkpad X systems are highly convenient, just would be nice if there existed a dependable boot drive solution.