The best gaming laptop for Win98:

After many years of searching, I finally managed to get my hands on a Compaq Presario 1800XL. In my opinion, this is the best laptop for retro gaming Windows 98. It's from the end of Compaq's golden age, before it was acquired by HP, so it's still well built and durable, has a big 15" square display, and it's relatively easy to find it with a display above 1024x768 (I think it's 1280x1024 or something), it has a built-in "discman", with a secondary LCD that has lighting, very charming, and a pair of very good JBL speakers , and that even after 20 years, you will find these speakers without any tears, due to being of good quality. It comes equipped with Pentium 3 mobile, and its great asset is that this processor is not soldered, it uses a small socket, that means that you can have it with a fast 1Ghz, or you can prefer something more modest like 600mhz, just open it and change it.I believe the maximum speed is 1ghz, but I could be wrong.

It features an 8MB or 16MB ATI Rage 128 graphics chip, it's powerful enough for things like quake 3, unreal, and games up to 1999, to run smoothly at native resolution. Another advantage is that when using lower resolutions, such as 320x240, 640x480, the screen will not be all deformed with poorly scaled pixels, this chip already has a scaling integrator that uses smoothing, in other words, it's like using low resolution in a regular desktop LCD monitor (a little blurry, but still pretty).

Lappy obviously has drivers for Windows 98 because at its launch, it was still very common for people to be using it, another advantage is that it has the optical drive and a floppy drive, it may seem silly, but there were a lot of laptops at that time they didn't have this combination, and you had to use one of them externally, or interchangeably.

Its housing is made of hard/firm plastic, especially on the underside (which has little feet like a keyboard), and inside it has a metal plate of approx. 1mm which is also a heatsink for the video chip and sound chip.

The LCD housing, on the other hand, is made of a material that I believe to be magnesium (material that most laptop hinges are made of, similar to metal), and its keyboard has "deep" keys (by deep, I mean the opposite of the keyboard of a macbook), which for my taste is nostalgic and comfortable.

The bad part that led me to create this topic

It has only one USB port (1.1), which at the time was quite reasonable, but nowadays it can be annoying, having to disconnect your Optical USB mouse every time when you want to use a flash drive to transfer files to it. A HUB would be equally annoying, because because the technology is 1.1, it doesn't supply enough amperage to maintain a HUB, which means you can use a HUB, but you'll have to supply it with an external 5v power source.

I said earlier that some parts of the housing are made of material that I believe is magnesium. There is a problem with this material, which also occurs in other notebooks that use it: Often someone keeps it in a damp place, and this material produces a kind of oxidation, a white thing that looks like salt. I see MANY iBooks G3 suffer from this, and mine's case was no exception. This forced me to disassemble the machine completely to clean and remove the damn "salt" that ended up everywhere. You can't just clean the part and assemble it all again, because over time, this happens again (even if it's not in a damp place), my tip for this is: Clean well with a wire brush, it's a lot of work to take it off, wash it well, wait for it to dry, and paint the piece with some kind of paint. The paint forms a protective film that prevents this from happening again.

Heat is another big issue, especially for me, as I live in Brazil, and it's hot here most of the year. Can't blame poor lappy, it's designed for someone who wears a suit all day, and a briefcase full of important papers, who would probably use it for Outlook, spreadsheets, and slideshows. We are really abusing these machines, wanting to run cool and demanding games.

It has a small and noisy 5v 0.8a cooler, which is covered with a rubber cover to prevent vibration noise. But this fan is mostly off, even when the machine is hot as hell. Noctua has models small enough to fit there, with better efficiency and less noise, but the fan problem is just the beginning. This model is completely closed at the bottom, that is, it does not have a place for the air to enter to be sucked out by the fan, there is no internal air renewal, and this is a problem. In a lot of pain, I had to cut a square under it, so that I could put a chipset heatsink (similar to a common heatsink on Slot 1 motherboards, it's a slightly lower heatsink). The heatsink directly touches the ATI video chip on the motherboard, so the heat generated by the chip is dissipated outside by this heatsink. The heatsink was perfectly flush with the housing, as the housing is made of thick plastic, so it didn't look like much of an aberration. This lowered the chip's temperature by an incredible 15 degrees, and the internal temperature by approximately 15 degrees, as the chip dissipated its heat on this piece of metal in the case.

Now it was the processor's turn. I observed spikes of up to 80 degrees on my P3 700mhz. The heatsink didn't use thermal grease, but a metallic adhesive with something that looked like graphite. I removed that, and put in some thermal grease, and the improvement was amazing, but I knew there was still room for improvement. The heatsink is made of a coarse and poorly finished material, very porous. I manually sanded the contact area of ​​the processor and chipset with some sandpaper, until I got an almost chrome finish, and that turned my notebook into a gaming machine, now the temperature doesn't go above 65 degrees, but it usually works most of the time. weather at 45 degrees.

This model has two more secrets: It has an onboard memory of 64MB, and one more free memory slot. But it has free "pads" to solder more memory, you can also unsolder the 64MB divided into 4 modules, and solder 256MB into 8 modules, and then add a 256MB in the free slot to total 512MB (the bios has no limitation). The second secret is that if you have a model that has 8MB of VRAM, you can also unsolder the memory, and solder 16MB, and this will work automatically, without the need to make edits to the BIOS, or anything else. It's so easy, I wonder why compaq just didn't use a module slot for VRAM.

I will post photos soon