Here's a screenshot of Windows Me running on here:

You can see just how much room you have to work with on this 1600 x 1200 resolution. Absolutely love it. This screen looks better than a lot of modern LCDs I have seen.

Another thing I forgot to mention is that this machine uses a Coppermine Pentium III mobile.

And, also; another upgrade I could do to this machine, since I have an extra motherboard, is upgrade it to an Inspiron 8100 board, which would give me a Tualatin Pentium III m. Not sure if I'll do that or not, because I'm not at all unhappy with the Coppermine 900MHz. It performs very well.

Something else that would be cool is that if I could find one of those QXGA 2048 x 1536 panels that some of the ThinkPads used, and get that to work in here! Those QXGA panels are just unreal.

I have two of these. Very nice machines. The only thing I don't like is the single expansion slot which means you have to choose between installing a Wi-Fi card or an Ethernet card, but can't have both at the same time. (Were combo Ethernet/Wi-Fi Mini-PCI cards ever made?) Currently I have the Wi-Fi card installed and use a PCMCIA Gigabit Ethernet adaptor.

I had to manually install the Wi-Fi antenna as I don't think it comes as standard on the 8000.

I believe the fastest CPU they can take is the 1000/700 GHz Coppermine. The i8kfangui31.exe utility is useful for controlling the fans/temperature.

I also have the removable CD-RW/DVD-ROM drive module.

I'm running Windows 2000 on my machines. (I think I remember trying XP but encountering driver issues.)

I don’t think they ever made combo mini-PCI cards, unfortunately. I keep the stock lan adapters in mine, and use a PCMCIA wireless card when I need wireless. Did they ever make laptops with 2 mini-PCI slots? I’ve never seen that before.

Yes, the fastest CPU for these was 1GHz.

I8kfangui is fantastic; I use it on all of my old Dells.

All of the default drivers Windows XP installs seem to work fine, and the Windows 2000 drivers I have tried in XP seem to work also.

I have 98 and 2000 dual-booted on my other one, so I wanted this one to be a little different.

Have you got the sound to work in pure DOS? I think I heard somewhere that the sound chip can emulate a sound blaster. I still haven't tried this myself. I've only ever run ME/2K/XP on these machines.

I haven’t tried that either. Would be interesting to see if that would work.

i had one of these, i think it was an 8100?

it had a 1.6/1.2? ghz speedstep, built in ethernet, 256mb ram, and a 30gb 4500rpm (slow) hdd.

I got it as a hand me down in 06, and ran the crap out of it until what appears to be a mb failure took it out in 2013. still have it tucked away somewhere.

upgraded the ram a bit, and that made a huge difference. That slow slow hdd was terrible though. We used it for audio recording via the Firewire port. we'd stop recording on set breaks, and by the time the break was over, the hdd finally caught up.
my first owned pc with winxp. i was told if i could fix it I could have it. wiped the hdd, fresh xp sp2 and it was fine. Loved playing civ 3 on it.

It was probably a 1.2GHz machine, as that was the fastest Pentium III m they made.

The maximum amount of RAM the 8000/8100s can take is 512MB. Mine currently all have 256, but I'd like to upgrade at least my 8100 to 512MB, as I have Windows XP SP3 on that one.

Should be easy to get another motherboard for it, as parts for these are still very plentiful.

Posting a long-overdue update for this machine:

Not long after this post, I found a 256MB PC-133 module and upgraded this machine to 384MB with it. I still want to go to the full 512MB eventually.

Then I reformatted the machine and rebuilt it with a Windows ME and Windows 2000 dual-boot, instead of the ME/XP SP1 dual-boot I had previously.

About a year or so ago, this machine suffered a fall from a vehicle to the ground (it was in the Dell leather case), but the case fell UPSIDEDOWN on the zipper side of the case, where there isn't any padding, so the corner of the display housing got broke, which was somewhat heartbreaking. First time I've ever had such an accident with a laptop and hopefully the last.

Otherwise the laptop still worked fine, it just looked lousy with a hunk of the top corner missing. So, a few weeks after that I bought a non-working 8000 with a better shell and transferred the guts of my old one into the new shell.

And just a couple of weeks ago, I replaced the fans as they were starting to grumble and slow-down on occasion, so I took the fans from the parts 8000, oiled them and they work great! First time I've ever oiled these type of fans before.

Since I had the whole laptop torn apart, I took the opportunity to fix the left trackpoint button, which had been finicky and driving me mad ever since I rebuilt this laptop with the new shell.

Upon inspection of the palmrest and comparing it to the old one, I realized the plamrest from my old 8000 was actually in better shape, so I put that back on, and it too also seemed to have an intermittent trackpoint left-button when tested with a multimeter, so I took the switch apart, cleaned it, and now it works perfectly. So glad to have that solved, as I use the trackpoint heavily.

Next thing that has to be corrected is this awful 4,200RPM 30GB drive I have in here. It's sloooooooow! It really drags on the boot times. Windows 2000 should be far quicker than it does on here. I did defrag it, which helped a little, but it's still slow. I ran a benchmark on the drive, and the transfer rates are indeed terrible.

Not sure what size drive I'm going to get yet, but it will definitely be a 5,400RPM one for sure.

Oh, and the speakers are absolutely blown out now. The foam is completely rotted. They have no bass response like they used to and sound like sizzling bacon! I have a parts Inspiron 8200 on the way to spiff-up my personal 8200 a bit, so hopefully I will have an extra set of speakers from that in the end for this 8000.

Well, the Inspiron 8200 I bought arrived and it is in great shape, so good that it replaced my "main" 8200 and I just moved a few of my better components over to it from the old one, such as my LCD, graphics card, HDD, etc.

So, since I parted my old 8200 out, that left me with a good set of speakers so the 8000 is sounding great once again! I'm really glad to have nice speakers on this thing again.

Oh, and since the "new" 8200 came with an Nvidia GeForce2GO 32MB card, that went into here also! My old 8200 had the Radeon 9000, which is a far newer and more powerful GPU, so that was reused the new 8200, leaving me with the spare Nvidia board.

The GeForce2Go was the base option for the 8200, but was the highest-end option for the 8000. The GeForce2GO I had in the 8000 was exactly the same, but it had only 16MB of VRAM instead of 32MB. Having 32MB now allows me to runs 3DMark2000 SE at the default settings, without getting the "out of VRAM" error I was getting before!

Here's a pic of the setup on the 8000, now showing 32MB of Video memory!

I should probably do a thread about the Inspiron 8200, as I have a lot I could say about that laptop as well.

This machine now has the full 512MB of RAM! I had an extra 256MB module and was debating what to put it in and decided to put it in this 8000 since I use it the most at the moment.

And also, a small correction I want to add to the OP, is that the UltraSharp LCD I don't think is actually a true IPS panel from what I've read, but it provided a very similar quality for a fraction of the price, which is great and probably why it's still pretty easy to find them today, unlike the IBM FlexVIew LCDs.

If you upgrade the HDD, I would get an IDE to m.2 SSD adapter and use that instead of a slow as dirt spinner.

I used to play multiplayer Warcraft III on the 1 GHz PIII / 512 MB RAM / 32 MB Geforce2 GO. Big battles would lag but otherwise it was perfectly playable.

Now, haha, forget it. That game has changed so much.

3DMark results:

3DMark2000: 4268
3DMark2001 SE: 2247

In previous configuration, with 750 MHz PIII / 512 MB RAM / 16 MB Rage Mobility M4, the results were:

3DMark2000: 1647
3DMark2001 SE: 656

That was some upgrade.

cyclone3d wrote on 2022-04-03, 05:39:

If you upgrade the HDD, I would get an IDE to m.2 SSD adapter and use that instead of a slow as dirt spinner.

I definitely want to do that at some point, although for now I opted for a 60GB 5,400RPM drive I found for dirt cheap, which will be a massive improvement over the old 4,200RPM 30GB drive.

The SSD options is really interesting to me for sure though. I've always disliked the solid state options for the older (mid 90s and older) systems as the hard drive sound is part of the experience to me, but these younger "vintage" machines I am really interested to try it. I think these machines would benefit more from the performance of solid state as well than much older machines would. Most hard drives by the early 2000s were quiet enough anyway that you probably wouldn't miss the sound much.

Only reason I opted for the hard drive for now is I know for sure that will work without fuss and won't require partition alignment or anything.

I will probably try the SSD option in one of my Pentium 4M-based dell laptops first, since they run XP as well, although my Inspiron 8200 is DAMN FAST with an 80GB WD Caviar Blue.

The old 4,200RPM drives really are dreadful though

As I recall the Speedstep functionality on these machines is not dynamic but set at POST. If the machine boots with the power cable connected then the CPU runs at full speed. If the cable is out, then the lower speed is selected. To change speeds you have to reboot.

Errius wrote on 2022-04-05, 05:49:

As I recall the Speedstep functionality on these machines is not dynamic but set at POST. If the machine boots with the power cable connected then the CPU runs at full speed. If the cable is out, then the lower speed is selected. To change speeds you have to reboot.

That is correct, it's one of the earliest implementations of Speedstep. However, you can set it in the BIOS to run at full speed off of the battery if you want, but I don't mind it clocking down, as it's not a huge performance change (it clocks down by 200MHz) and it runs cooler and saves on battery (all good things for on-the-go use).

This laptop doesn't get terribly hot at all though, even running at full speed. I also run I8kfangui on it to make the fans kick-in much sooner than they normally would, which keeps the temps at very reasonable levels, especially after removing the thermal pad on the CPU heatsink and replacing it with thermal paste.

Okay, so I got the 60GB drive installed and it's a great improvement for sure. It's still not going to break any records, but the speed increase is very noticeable.

Here's the drive before I installed it, a 60GB Samsung IDE drive. I've had good luck with these Samsung drives and this one was dirt cheap and tested, so I couldn't resist.

And here's the before and after benchmarks:

I'm very happy. The laptop runs much better now. Getting my Windows Me/2000 dual-boot reinstalled was time consuming, but it was well worth it. I also have it set-up with Acronis OS Selector now instead of the built-in Windows loader, so now no matter which partition I boot from, the boot drive is always C:. Before, Windows 2000 was booting from D:, which is a PITA sometimes as a lot of programs install to C: by default, so you would end up installing your Win2k apps on the WinMe partition if you weren't careful.

And something else I want to mention unrelated to the hard drive, is that the Inspiron 8000 and 8100 (aka Latitude C800 and C810) DO use different motherboards, as the Coppermine Pentium III Mobile uses a different socket than the Tualatin Pentium IIIm does.

I've been thinking about possibly getting one of the 1GHz Coppermine PIII Mobiles for this laptop, since that would pretty much max it out, but they seem to be impossible to find! And really, it's only 100MHz of difference at the end of the day, so I probably won't bother unless one comes up for really cheap. I'm perfectly happy with the 900MHz chip.

Hitachi or HGST 100GB PATA 7200rpm 2.5" not expensive and I got one of these.

Cheers,

pentiumspeed wrote on 2022-04-11, 18:18:

Hitachi or HGST 100GB PATA 7200rpm 2.5" not expensive and I got one of these.

Cheers,

7,200RPM?! Wow, I was wondering if they made IDE/PATA in that speed. Will have to look into getting a few of those!

Zack_H wrote on 2022-04-12, 03:35:

7,200RPM?! Wow, I was wondering if they made IDE/PATA in that speed. Will have to look into getting a few of those!

Those were quite common in early 2000's before SATA became mainstream in mid-2000's. I don't have any PATA 7200 RPM 2.5" at 100GB but I have a 60GB, still running in my Win98SE build. Also have a 3.5" 7200 RPM PATA at 250GB.