I got the Ni-Cd battery out of the Latitude XPi I posted above. It had corroded the connector and the whole connector came off of the motherboard! Thankfully, the pads are still there and in good shape, so if I get another battery for it I can just solder it back on. No big deal. I'm very glad the battery is gone now, and would urge any other XPi owners to also remove their backup batteries, as they will cause some nasty damage to the motherboard eventually. A few of the vias and components had corrosion on them on mine, but nothing too bad really. I gave the area a clean with some 91% IPA to get rid of any battery gunk that was still there.

Also, this machine has a great design, where you take the three screws out of the bottom, and the palm-rest slides down and comes off! No annoying tabs to break.

And yes, it does still work after reassembly 😀 It's really a great Windows 95 laptop.

Here's two family-photos of *most* of my Dell laptops:

Aside from the duplicates I have, the only one missing is my Inspiron 2500, which I was just too lazy to pull out of storage. I'll get a pic of it tomorrow.

From top-left to bottom-right: Latitude XPi, Latitude CPi, Inspiron 8000, Inspiron 8100, Inspiron 4150, Inspiron 8200, Precision M50, and the Inspiron 5100.

I'm incredibly happy with this collection. I should also mention that all of these machines work perfectly.

Another interesting thing to note is that the Inspiron 5100 (the blue & silver one) uses a *desktop* Pentium 4 chip, not a mobile. It does get pretty warm, but it's not too bad, and is a great little Windows 2000/XP machine.

The Inspiron 5100 wasn't nearly as trouble-prone as the Inspiron 5150 that came after it. In fact, the 5100s are actually quite reliable.

By the way, I'm actually using the Inspiron 5100 to type this post!

Stacks of GX100/110 in the office... Some more...
In the lobby on the way to ewaste.. Some more...

genii wrote:

https://i.imgur.com/if69S0u.jpgStacks of GX100/110 in the office... https://i.imgur.com/jyQAPOL.jpgSome more... https://i.imgu […]
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Stacks of GX100/110 in the office... Some more...
In the lobby on the way to ewaste.. Some more...

Dude.. If any of the GX100/110s have the 2x PCI 2x ISA riser for the Low Profile cases, PLEASE I BEG YOU PLEASE grab one of them and a working PSU, and ship them to me before they goes to e-waste. I've been looking for that riser for YEARS..

Are ALL of those getting trashed or just the broken ones? It'd be a crying shame for those to all be junked, as I'm sure most of them probably work fine.

I love the look of that particular case style. I've got one of the thinner, single drive bay models that's a Pentium 166. Very well-built machines (as are most Dells from back-then).

Dude.. If any of the GX100/110s have the 2x PCI 2x ISA riser for the Low Profile cases, PLEASE I BEG YOU PLEASE grab one of them and a working PSU, and ship them to me before they goes to e-waste. I've been looking for that riser for YEARS..

If you PM zipcode/postal code I can figure out shipping and let you know.

Are ALL of those getting trashed or just the broken ones? It'd be a crying shame for those to all be junked, as I'm sure most of them probably work fine.

We got them donated from the City, idea was to install Xubuntu with a modem and distribute to low-income households. The plan fell by the wayside and the machines went into storage for about 5 years until it was no longer feasible to keep storing them. All were working. Many were stripped for hard drives, cards, and CPUs before going to the ewaste.

Okay, here’s my Inspiron 2500.

This is basically a stripped-down 8000. Doesn’t have the dedicated graphics, docking connector, the S-video/TV connector, 1394 FireWire, or a Trackpoint. This is also the base-model with a Celeron and a 12” 800 x 600 screen. It’s a decent little vintage laptop though. I think it’s a very interesting machine. I run Windows Me on it, which is what most of these came with. Windows Me is very stable on these.