So far so good.
Every time I thought you were going to ask a question you then continued with how you fixed the problem yourself, very good work!
Personally, I don't bother with updating old OS's unless it fixes a specific issue I'm having.
No point with security patches, even if you apply all of them, plenty more exist
even fully patched they are full of security holes.

It is possible to use even GeForce4 Go 440, GeForce4 Ti and ATI Radeon 9000 graphics from newest Latitude C840 or Inspiron 8200, they are compatible. PSU for C810 could be PA-6 (70W), it is good enough, but PA-9 (90W) is compatible too (they are intended for Latitude C840 and Inspiron 8200, where PA-6 is weak). Chassis is changeable between Latitude C610 and 840 (and somewhat Inspiron too, I think), but keyboard on C610 has inverted connector: where on C610 is female, on C840 is male and vice versa. GeForce2 Go exists in two versions: 16 and 32MB. You can use even display with resolution 1400x1050, they exist on both version Latitude and maybe even on Inspiron.

chinny22 wrote on 2024-07-09, 00:01:

So far so good. Every time I thought you were going to ask a question you then continued with how you fixed the problem yourself […]
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So far so good.
Every time I thought you were going to ask a question you then continued with how you fixed the problem yourself, very good work!
Personally, I don't bother with updating old OS's unless it fixes a specific issue I'm having.
No point with security patches, even if you apply all of them, plenty more exist
even fully patched they are full of security holes.

THANK YOU!!! I did run into some troubles restoring this thing 🤣 but it was all a fun experience :DDD, like when I opened the keyboard and realized that I have to remove it, I got scared because I thought I have to yank the ribbon cable out then I discovered the tabs that are holding them in place LMAOO (I have bad EXPERIENCES with fragile small ribbon cables so I hate them)

but speaking of problems, I have this habit of looking in the depths of the web for an answer to problems before I go asking xDD ie going through ancient posts in vogons, looking through dead website links and trying out all options!!
I thought about it too but I sometimes love to think how it would be fun to browse on them sometimes but then I realize that there is just nothing it will accomplish other than being a cool experiment 🤣.
but I feel like I agree with you there's no point in updating old OSes unless there's a feature you really need (.NET Applications.. etc idk)

One problem I think I might face soon is that I don't think I researched the ESS Chip in it enough.. The laptop has an ESS Maestro 3i, having owned ESS cards because they were sooo cheap when I was a teen on amazon and offered excellent SB16 and DOS Compatibility, I thought this thing would be the same xD but I found that the drivers that dell has online lack ESFM Emulation.. Which was a bummer, I'm trying to figure out a workaround for this!

Ydee wrote on 2024-07-09, 09:58:

It is possible to use even GeForce4 Go 440, GeForce4 Ti and ATI Radeon 9000 graphics from newest Latitude C840 or Inspiron 8200, they are compatible. PSU for C810 could be PA-6 (70W), it is good enough, but PA-9 (90W) is compatible too (they are intended for Latitude C840 and Inspiron 8200, where PA-6 is weak). Chassis is changeable between Latitude C610 and 840 (and somewhat Inspiron too, I think), but keyboard on C610 has inverted connector: where on C610 is female, on C840 is male and vice versa. GeForce2 Go exists in two versions: 16 and 32MB. You can use even display with resolution 1400x1050, they exist on both version Latitude and maybe even on Inspiron.

YEAH!! It's such a sexy laptop tbh!! Mine has the Geforce 2 GO with 16MB of VRAM and a 1600x1200 display, as for the adapter mine is a PA-9 😀)
I might consider upgrading it with a geforce 4 later, I feel like that would be such a good addition to an already late tualatin laptop and I never really thought of it before so thank you!!

Back when I got this laptop, I also picked up a Latitude C610 which worked with the charger when I tested it (it has a 1GHz Pentium 3 and an ATi M3 Graphics Card) but I decided to go with the C810 for restoration because it has an Nvidia card which might be better for games ig?

Right now, I'm trying to come up with a way to get ESFM drivers for this laptop because I love the sound of opl music and having used ESS Cards before (ESS1938-S) I thought this one would have DOS/SB16 FM Emulation but the dell drivers don't have them :cc so im trying to figure that out rn.

I'm afraid the ESFM is already missing from ESS Maestro 3i, there's just a software wavetable with 1 MB a 3 MB GM set. ESS1938-S (Solo) has hw ESFM.

I took the dell latitude c810 to work today to work on documents offline in office 2003 and honestly its doing a great job at it!!

Nice restoration work on that laptop!
With 512 MB of RAM and an SSD, you should actually be able to browse online to some decent extent under Windows XP and one of them retro-friendly browsers (New Moon, Serpent, etc.) Just make sure to put SP2 on there, along with update KB958644 (otherwise, you can still get the DownAdUp worm when browsing online, IIRC)... or just SP3.

I have a Latitude C610. Got it back in 2010 and actively used it as my personal laptop up until 2018. It was quite a pain to browse online with it towards the end... but that's because I didn't know about the retro-friendly browsers back then and only used Firefox 24. Unfortunately (or not so much), the HDD corrupted the OS install in 2018, so I put that laptop on the side and changed it for a newer one. Still kept it, of course, and eventually re-installed XP with SP3 on there. It is now my workbench PC that I use for looking up electronics datasheets and sending or recording audio signals for my audio projects. I also absolutely LOVE the keyboard on that thing. Glad to see you put Office on your c810 and use it for office tasks. Probably you'll also fall in love with the keyboard on these laptops sooner than later. They really were designed to be great office work machines.

Thank you so much for your detailed guide. I got one recently and was able to install Windows 7 on it. However, I could not find the correct drivers. The audio driver worked but eh NVIDIA one did not work. I could not make the ethernet work, as well. My goal is to install Windows 2000. Could you help me find the drivers? I also tried to find a disk image of the system but could not find it. Let me know if you have any insights.

EBDERLERL wrote on 2024-07-08, 14:13:

Hello everyone https://web.archive.org/web/20091022013527im_/http://www.geocities.com/jessiemoses/wavingsmile.gif […]
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Hello everyone

I have been reading posts in the vogons forums since I was a kid and I was always fascinated by the posts here and the amount of information!! so I'm really excited to post my first build/restoration log here 😁

I've always wanted to have a laptop that could run late 90s/early 2000s windows games + a little bit of dos games, So during my visit to a huge scrap/thrift market in my city which is an industrial area that's full of car scrap, electronic scraps and shops!!

I loved exploring the place there as I have found a lot of PS/2 Keyboards, bunch of old laptops, CRTs and more
I picked up this dell latitude c810 along with a c610 two years ago when I was exploring the place around xD
but I haven't done anything to work on them until now because of the proprietary charger which was really hard to find locally...

The laptop was in a good condition except that it lacked a hard disk bay + the hard disk adapter (dell loves to have everything custom/proprietary huh..) so I decided to do some research and found the missing parts online .

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This laptop was released back in Late 2001 or Early 2002? It's one of the last pentium 3 laptops (Pentium 3-M!!) I guess but this laptop was business oriented but there was a consumer oriented version which was the inspiron (8000/8100) they're both the same specwise.
On the bottom of the laptop there's a windows 2000 OEM sticker which leads me to believe that this model shipped with 2000 but we have a windows XP sticker when we open the laptop which why I decided to go with Windows XP.

The goal of this restoration is to have a laptop that could do the following things:
- Run Late 90s Games/ Early 2000s games
- Play DOS games (Would check the sound capabilities once I get into Windows)
- Dual Boot Windows XP and ME (went with ME because I had good experiences with it and the drivers on dells website are only for windows ME..)

Here are the laptops specifications!!:
- Intel Pentium III Mobile 1.13GHz (Tulatain!!)
-815EP Chipset
- 256MB PC133 RAM
- ESS Maestro 3
- Nvidia Geforce 2 GO
- Detachable Module Bays!! (This one came with a Floppy disk Module and a Battery Module)
- CD-RW Optical Drive
- 1600x1200 Display

So the past two weeks, I have ordered:
- A Charger (Dell PA-9 AC Adapter)
- 2x 256 MB Samsung PC133 Ram Sticks (Maximum is 512MB because the chipset is an Intel 815EP)
- A hard disk bay
- MSATA to IDE + 256GB Samsung MSATA SSD

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Upon first boot up we are greeted with the Dell splash screen and we enter the BIOS..
it seems that the fixed CD-RW Drive isn't being detected.. weird it could be faulty

So I decided to open up the laptop to clean it up and I discovered that the GeForce 2 GO is passively cooled by the keyboard.

The CPU heatsink was a little dusty so I decided to take it out and clean it, but after I opened the latch I was surprised to see that there was no thermal paste at all on the CPU die xD but above the plate that rests on the die there was a thermal pad that transfers heat to the heatsink but still I decided to install a little bit of thermal paste inorder to improve the thermals 😀

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I also cleaned the contacts of the CD drive connector with WD-40 contact cleaner which solved the issue and it was being detected again!

I also put the SSD into the MSATA to IDE caddy, connected the HDD adapter (dell LOVES being proprietary :c ) and plopped it inside the laptop :DD

Upon first boot up with the SSD Installed, I discovered that the laptop BIOS glitched out and would hang.. it wouldn't even show the Hard disks or optical drives, so I thought a BIOS update would fix the issue and it did!!

while making the windows ME CD (I went with the arabic enabled version which I found on archive.org) I edited the image, put drivers and the bios update 😁 (A06 -> A12)

The SSD was finally being detected after a bios update but there was another unfortunate thing xD this laptop doesn't support 48-bit LBA which means the controller would stop at 137ish GB which is what it detected it as.. now I'm sure this could've been solved in a bios update as this is only a software issue, I'm sure once I boot into windows XP I would be able to use the rest of the space but I don't know if there's a way to use it with Windows ME :cc (rolews patches doesn't detect the SSD as a 48-bit LBA drive for some reason when I was trying to install windows)

so after following some forum posts, I settled on using plop boot manager as the gateway to dual-booting Windows XP and ME on this laptop 😀, despite everyone saying that it is hard to use and set up, I found it to be extremely easy!! all you need to do is install it before you install the OSes and after you partition the drives.

I burnt Hiren's BootCD and used Ranish Partition Manager/Acronis Disk Director (because ranish doesn't support partitioning NTFS drives :LL) to partition the drives and I partitioned them as such:
1 - 30 GB Windows XP (NTFS)
2 - 30 GB Windows ME (FAT32)
3 - 55 GB Shared Partition (FAT32) that I could use between the OSes for games/drivers and more
I find the sizes I've chosen to be more than enough for my use for this laptop and I wanted to stay safe below the 137GB limit.

I followed FaSMaN's comment where he pointed out in a post that he made a video where he used it and I used that as a basis to follow 😀

Re: PLOP Boot manager+DOS+WIN98+Win ME

- Installing Plop Boot Manager -
I Installed Plop Boot Manager after partitioning and set up the profiles of the OSes so that they do not see each other when running except for the shared drive (when installing windows I also hide the shared partition because it clears it out for some reason if I don't do that :L)

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I installed windows XP first along with drivers and updated it to SP1 then I proceeded to installing Windows ME.
It was all going smoothly until I decided to update Windows ME using the Update CD that was uploaded to archive.org https://archive.org/details/wmeupd-r2

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I started getting BSODs when installing the updates and it would ruin the installation, at first I thought it was because the version I'm using is Arabic Enabled but the same thing ended up happening when I tried it with an an english version.

I will keep this thread updated with benchmarks when I get the chance of doing them :DD