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Need some help valuating an old laptop

I have an IBM T40 laptop that still runs nicely, battery still works, well built, dual boots linux/xp, a good "real XP" machine, for things that fail in wine32. Also a good support community:


As DOS and other retro modes start to be dropped in new PCs, expect these to be more sort after. But as things are, you can still find an average clunky XP laptop for about £10, loads of them were made..
 
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hunterjwizzard said:
I'm only got so much room in my brain for laptop models. Apparently less than I thought.
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FWIW, the Dell you have in front of you has exactly the same guts as a Thinkpad T40 series, it just has a lousier case. Not a T43, though, those had Radeon X300s, not 9000s, and Dothan CPUs instead of Banias. (Faster frontside bus.) It will "game" just as well as a T40-42 with similar specs. (The T40 through 42 confuse me because they came in so many different hardware specs, but they all overlap with what Dell put in the D600/600m. The Dell equivalent of a T43 is a Latitude D610.) I imagine the big difference for gaming is the X300 is a Direct X 9-capable card, the 9000 is only DX 8.1, but if you're running a DX 8.1 compatible game the speed difference between them is nearly nil. (like 15% or so?)

A thing you'll notice is that Pentium M laptops by and large had remarkably similar specs regardless of who made them. Intel was pushing this whole "Centrino" initiative at the time, which dictated very specific CPU/Chipset combinations in "thin and light" laptops (under six pounds, preferably), to the point that they made it a little difficult to buy Pentium M CPUs for anything that didn't fit that template. This was the era where a "gaming laptop" had a Pentium 4 in it, weighed the better part of ten pounds, sounded like a leaf blower once you got it going, and had a battery that lasted just long enough to let you walk across the house and change outlets, and even though the Pentium M could usually outrun those beasts (especially on battery) Intel didn't want to end up as a one product company.
 
IBM released the budget G40/G41 series laptop as a desktop replacement with Pentium 4 (actual desktop CPUs) but had anemic graphics so not for gamers.

While I have a ton of different model ThinkPads I never owned a G series.

X300 is about the same chip as the ATI 9550/9600 (PCIE based) so should be faster than a 9000. I used to game in the XP era with an ATI 9000 AGP card and it wasn't too bad.
 
Unknown_K said:
X300 is about the same chip as the ATI 9550/9600 (PCIE based) so should be faster than a 9000. I used to game in the XP era with an ATI 9000 AGP card and it wasn't too bad.
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The benchmarks I found put it at only 16% faster. I’m sure your mileage will vary, but all these chips in laptop form were aimed at business applications, not games.

Don’t get me wrong, they were decent for the time and much better than the integrated graphics you’d find on 800-series Intel chipsets, but they’re actually very much in the same ballpark as the GMA950 in the first gen Core laptops. Absolutely nothing to write home about.
 
So here’s a thing from the “why did I do this?” file: a couple days ago I saw the title of a YouTube video talking about a “win98-quick install” project on GitHub. Just for laughs I looked to see if the D600 was where I left it, and… low and behold, a D600 will run Windows ME:
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Posting this screenshot to show I managed to get 3D acceleration working; no idea if this is a good score or anything, but it runs. I also have sound in Windows, and the SB emulation driver shows as functional in the hardware manager, but I haven’t tried any DOS software yet.

I installed 98 first, but fewer things worked out of the box so I tried ME and it was a bit smoother, although I would love to know how to get rid of the stupid password prompt that’s baked into the quick install dist. (Anyone know?) I had to hunt down a patched Radeon driver installer separately, all the quick install had was a VESA driver. (Lame)

I dunno why I did this, I hate Win9x, but I imagine this proves that the OP’s laptop might be interesting to *somebody*.
 
Eudimorphodon said:
Before you say I'm being mean let me clarify one thing: from what I can tell the Inspiron 600m is the same laptop as the "business class" Latitude D600; I still have a D600 lying around somewhere (no idea if it still works at this point) and I very much like the D600, but... lets face it, they're not good for anything anymore. They're ooold, but not old enough to run Windows 9x well, and their CPU and video card, while *pretty decent* for a 2003 laptop, are way too anemic for XP gaming, so there's very little "retro value" here. And for practical use these fell off the end of the usability bathtub curve almost a decade ago. IE, there's no more mainstream support for 32 bit OSes and web browsers and they've been too slow for the modern internet (or even watching a Youtube video) since well before Covid. My D600 was my "networking troubleshooting dingus" for a long time but it lost that job to a Core2Duo Thinkpad T61 I found in a garbage heap for free.(*)
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I feel like people are too quick to throw certain models of laptops to the curb just because there is something better out there. I do feel it's a bit silly to say one 23 year old laptop is worse than this other 20 year old laptop because the 20 year old laptop is faster. I try to judge this stuff strictly on its own merits. The Mobility Radeon 9000 graphics are very capable for early XP-era gaming (2001/02). The 600m/D600 retains driver support for Windows 98 (as you've found out). I don't know how stable it runs because it is at the end of that era, but assuming it runs decent enough, it would be able to run most late 90s titles fantastically. You could have a lot of fun gaming on this thing.
Even laptops much "worse" than this one prove to be very capable if you stop comparing them to higher-end hardware that was available at the time. Take the Intel GMA 900. I'm sure that name makes many of you shiver! But it benchmarks similar to or better than the ATI Mobility Radeon 7500, which was one of the top-end mobile chips available in 2002. A 2005 laptop with the GMA900 graphics isn't gonna fare well against 2005 games, but you can bet you have a capable system for early 00s/some late 90s stuff there, plus emulators, dosbox, etc. People love their ThinkPad A31s despite how hot and unreliable they are. You could grab a lightweight Pentium M with the GMA 900 instead and get a similar experience! (of course I know that the performance isn't why people love the A31 so much, but it works well as an example :) )

If anyone is curious, I benchmarked a whole bunch of laptop graphics chips back in January and did a writeup: https://macdat.net/laptops/misc/gpubenchmarks.html

Eudimorphodon said:
… fwiw, I pasted that into Dell’s service tag lookup and it said it belonged to a Inspiron 6000, not a 600m. Which is it? Not that it changes much, they’re both doorstops. The specs you said (1.6ghz + Radeon 9000) sound like a 600m, maybe Dell reuses service tags?
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Weird. I'm honestly surprised anything came up, Dell has purged most of the old service tags from their database. I think the oldest Dell laptop I own that still came up was my D830.
 
3lectr1c said:
You could have a lot of fun gaming on this thing.
Even laptops much "worse" than this one prove to be very capable if you stop comparing them to higher-end hardware that was available at the time.
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That's kinda my hope as I continue cleaning and tuning this thing. Somebody out there wants to retro-game on metal, lives in an apartment, and is on a budget.
 
3lectr1c said:
I try to judge this stuff strictly on its own merits. The Mobility Radeon 9000 graphics are very capable for early XP-era gaming (2001/02). The 600m/D600 retains driver support for Windows 98 (as you've found out). I don't know how stable it runs because it is at the end of that era, but assuming it runs decent enough, it would be able to run most late 90s titles fantastically. You could have a lot of fun gaming on this thing.
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I guess looking at your chart of benchmarks 3DMark99 might not have been the most flattering version to run on this laptop. (It scores almost the same as Intel 855 chipset graphics and an old first-gen Mobility Radeon, despite handily defeating them in later versions. Good reminder of how so many of these benchmarks would be utterly broken by driver cheats, perhaps?) Anyway. Yeah, if a laptop to play Windows 9x->early XP-era games is really something you want this machine would do it, although... meh. All the bad memories came flooding back and I haven't powered the laptop on since, so I guess I'm not the target audience for this. It's so easy to play most of these games on modern Windows, or even Wine, and *not* have to deal with an operating system made out of cardboard and razor blades underneath... :P

3lectr1c said:
Clean working 600ms will sell for around $100 on eBay.
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Which I guess kind of speaks for itself.
 
Eudimorphodon said:
I guess looking at your chart of benchmarks 3DMark99 might not have been the most flattering version to run on this laptop. (It scores almost the same as Intel 855 chipset graphics and an old first-gen Mobility Radeon, despite handily defeating them in later versions.
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This is because the benchmark won't go above 60fps unless vsync is fully disabled on the driver level, which isn't made easily possible for most video drivers. Definitely not the best representation for anything newer than 2001 or so.
 
The easiest way to see what it's worth is to look on eBay at the Sold Items to see if any actually sold. Here in the UK the your Dell Inspirion 600m in it's current condition is worth around £16.99 (including postage and packing) if it is repaired and refurbished with no missing keys, working hard disk with Windows XP installed on it and has a power supply (one sold for £7.99 recently) then I'd say up to £69.99 including delivery etc. Without a power supply I'd say £49.99 including delivery.

Upgrading the RAM or HDD may not add too much (if any) extra value to it, but it would make it stand out from any other listings and stop anyone from haggling down your price as it would be slightly better spec than other listings maybe?

As others have said, if you factor in all your time to getting this repaired, it's not really worth it. If repairing old laptops is your hobby and you enjoy it and you'd do it anyway even if you weren't selling it on eBay and are documenting it on your own personal blog or youtube account then go for it!
 
Eudimorphodon said:
not old enough to run Windows 9x well
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why would you think that it is not going to run win9x? Chipset and Radeon drivers are for sure there from Intel and ATI. Usually, sound card is an issue on these XP laptops but on this one it is most probably ac97, so shall not be a problem either to get something out of the speakers... That said, I would still agree on a very little value of such machines, even if you get win9x installed on it unless it is top spec + full complete box + nostalgia...
 
killrambo said:
why would you think that it is not going to run win9x? Chipset and Radeon drivers are for sure there from Intel and ATI.
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If you’d read further it’s pretty clear I stand corrected… although I would probably pin a “barely” to that. The improved WDM support in Windows ME seems like it helped a lot compared to 98, the Radeon drivers need DirectX 9 installed to work, neither USB or Ethernet wanted to work under 98 (maybe fixable, but was definitely not a thing I wanted to waste that much effort on)… *shrug*. If the end result is something you really want maybe it’s worth it.

Ironically sound was the one thing that seemed easy to get going under both 98 and ME.

EDIT: anyone know of a WPA ME-compatible wireless driver for Atheros-based mini-PCI cards? The Dells came with a Broadcom chipset card but I swapped it for an Atheros card I ripped out of a router literally two decades ago because at the time the Linux drivers were infinitely better. I poked around a little but came up dry.
 
Laptop gaming didn't happen until XP or later, so I don't see that many people spending cash to have a shitty Win98 experience on commodity laptops. This isn't Japan where room in your house is crazy expensive that you can't have a couple of full-sized towers.
 
Yeah I think sometimes people forget that "gaming" in the 90s wasn't just playing AAA titles with high-end GPUs.
 
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