Dell releasing the first ARM laptop wasn't something I expected from this series.

@CathodeRayDude

8 ай бұрын

...god I think you're right.

@Hugobros3

8 ай бұрын

@@CathodeRayDude I believe the OpenPandora might have been first (at least it would have been if it didn't get stuck in production hell), and it had almost the same cpu: an OMAP 3530@600Mhz.

@nickwallette6201

8 ай бұрын

This all makes me really appreciate modern MacBooks. Lift lid, put finger on sensor, do things. Honest-to-gosh, 0 sec boot time to a full OS. AND eight hours of battery life. haha

@GYTCommnts

8 ай бұрын

The OpenPandora! I was obsessed to have one, but not only was out of my reach, but it took too long to produce! Back then was more difficult to go on with a project like that. Nowadays you have crowdfunding that makes things easier...

@belstar1128

8 ай бұрын

No the first one was made by acorn in 1992

Born too early to explore the universe, born too late to explore the world, born just in time to enjoy Cathode Ray Dude. I'm good with this.

@marsandbars

8 ай бұрын

We get to exist in a weird dichotomy of passion about old tech and the ever-expanding capabilities of new tech.

@adampope5107

8 ай бұрын

Most explorers die terrible deaths. I'm good.

@williambrasky3891

8 ай бұрын

Buddy, if you think we are on track to explore the universe, you aren’t paying attention. If we’re lucky, we might get to stay on the world we got.

@metallaholic

8 ай бұрын

the Cathode Ray Dude abides.

@Thegonagle

8 ай бұрын

@@williambrasky3891We just need to break the warp-speed barrier. 😂 But seriously, many many generations from now, who knows what future physicists will discover? Keep reaching, and never say never.

When the Raspberry Pi came out, I thought it would be cool to install one in a PC case along with the x86 board. But then I thought "what the hell would I do with it?" and moved on.

@GYTCommnts

8 ай бұрын

Retroarch?

@osgeld

8 ай бұрын

I have a pi 4 buried in my mini ITX ryzen system, I use it via wifi and VNC, but its not like the two are tied together in any since other than the PSU

@BrendonGreenNZL

8 ай бұрын

Use it to implement a remote power switch, hardware watchdog, or HDMI CEC receiver?

@yaketyyakumo3315

8 ай бұрын

There’s the PiKVM, which lets you effectively use a Pi to add server-tier remote access capabilities.

@VinceMulhollon

8 ай бұрын

Massive amounts of digital I/O. Although its more usable if mounted outside the case, and Arduino has better I/O, and cheaper.

They should only make machines [bigger/smaller] than this never gets old. And we get both in one machine. Fantastic.

@BlakeHelms

8 ай бұрын

Beat me to it! One of my favorite running gags. It’s the CRD equivalent of “the magic of buying two of them”

@Hugobros3

8 ай бұрын

@@BlakeHelms heh. Two of them.

@mndlessdrwer

8 ай бұрын

I think the perfect machine might be something like the XPS 13, with it's miniscule bezels and beautiful display, but with a 4:3 display. I desperately miss the form factor of my old Mac Pro's display. It was just so nice to use when doom scrolling social media or reading novels or manga/webcomics. 16:9 is really only ever useful for video consumption, which is really not the biggest use of my laptop for me. I'm rarely without access to a television with some form of content streaming, so I'd really rather have my laptop be more useful for other content types. Plus it would let them fit a relatively compact laptop with a massive trackpad.

@alfredklek

8 ай бұрын

The only thing better than a display bigger or smaller than 13 inches would be two of them.

@BrendonGreenNZL

8 ай бұрын

​@@mndlessdrwerStupid Hollywood media. They've ruined computer monitors.

I like your subtle jabs at executives and bosses trying to look important. Says a lot about your work experience in the past. So happy you are free to choose your own path now!

@rossstewart9475

8 ай бұрын

Ironically, the features on display here are a result of the importance of executives: A product like this almost certainly had many opportunities to be abandoned when engineers realised it's pointlessness, but *someone* had to be pushing for a multi-disciplinary, cross-department project like this to be seen through... Sunk cost is a hell of a drug I guess. Are psychopaths and sociopaths more prone to it, I wonder?

@hahasamian8010

8 ай бұрын

Subtle?

@benanderson89

8 ай бұрын

He's about as subtle as a baby being thrown into a jet engine...

@FlyboyHelosim

8 ай бұрын

@@benanderson89 LOL

@MrFluteboy1980

8 ай бұрын

Batman Arkham Knight quote: "All the subtlety of a napalm enema!"😂

This series is covering some of the most genius, over engineered and yet utterly useless advances in laptop tech from the late 00s and early 10s. I'm absolutely loving every episode of this journey.

MontaVista was quietly a _huge_ deal in the Linux ecosystem because of how much general kernel work they did in the 2000s. Most of the preemptive SMP stuff that made Linux work well on small symmetric multiprocessor machines (eg. multicore processors) came from them (...and especially from their employee at the time Robert Love, who wrote an excellent book on kernel development, he was later the chief architect for desktop systems at SuSE for a while, and did a ton of the low-level Linux work before Android reached the market).

@prgnify

8 ай бұрын

If I'm not mistaken, Robert Love also worked for the guys who created Evolution, before it was 'GNOME' Evolution. Possibly was the point of contact that facilitated the software CRD presents in this video.

@pappp1428

8 ай бұрын

Yes, he was at Ximian (where Evolution started) after he was at MontaVista before Novell ate them. That's AFIK how he ended up at SuSE (at the time also part of Novell). He's also been involved in Gnome in various ways, you see some of his work in NetworkManager, especially around the VPN parts. ...now that you say it, I wonder how much of the platform shown here is his doing, it traces neatly along a series of projects he was deeply involved with in the years before it came out.

@CathodeRayDude

8 ай бұрын

That makes a lot of sense, and as far as I know MontaVista got plenty of business, just not in this particular niche, so I'm not surprised that they made a lot of contributions.

@CantankerousDave

8 ай бұрын

Flashing back to the AltaVista search engine, my go-to before google.

@mattBLACKpunk

8 ай бұрын

Not using the faster primary cpu is such a stupid self inflicted handicap I swear

Yeah, modern Qi charging uses an in-band communication protocol. One of the neat advantages of having two magnetically coupled devices is that the device receiving power can push back a little bit by varying its power draw (put a resistor across the coil), and the transmitter can notice this. You can also modulate the pattern that you're pushing back in to send different messages, like "more power please" or "Yup I'm a Qi certified receiver, send juice please"

@skyleite

8 ай бұрын

That's insanely cool

@JessHull

8 ай бұрын

I appreciate how polite Qi is when it talks to itself about its needs and identity.

You gave USB-C docks a hard time, but I would contend that DisplayLink is a worse crime against users.

real life can wait, CRD has uploaded a new video. I seriously drop everything when you upload a new one.

@greenphlem

8 ай бұрын

Yep same

@GoTeamScotch

8 ай бұрын

My lunch break at work just got way longer. 🫡

@Direct0rkrennic

8 ай бұрын

Hope he never drops a video while you're driving 😂

The reader is the perfect companion for people flying to any destination remember in planes there used to be no network wireless or otherwise back then.

@cericat

7 ай бұрын

@@thomasbohl6924yeah with the same power draw, just log into windows and use airplane mode (yes a thing in 2010 laptops).

That wireless charging gimmick is a masterpiece in aggressively dumb design. WOW! That makes my day! In a phone, it makes perfect sense. In a laptop, it makes absolutely no sense at all. If you're going to put it on a dock, where it will stay there, stationary, we already solved the problem of conveying charging current without cables. Prongs and contacts. If it's good enough for my Roomba, it's good enough for a laptop. And the dock doesn't even do port-replicator stuff. For that, you need the wireless dock! This thing is wireless for the sake of being wireless, and that's just ... * chef's kiss * Bravo, Dell. Truly an engineering marvel. As in, you will marvel at what the engineers were thinking.

@arahman56

18 күн бұрын

That said, a Qi dockpad (like Logitech) could be a good idea...especially before we got USB-C passthrough charging.

I couldn't get over the fact that spamming the arrow keys in Latitude ON would send the spotlight effect into an incredibly long loop around the screen. This is an incredibly reliable piece of software

i love these quick start videos showing off 00's trickery that seems surreal in today's tech... kinda like mrmobile reviewing old gimmick phones but even more obscure. never stop man

@gotoastal

8 ай бұрын

’00s* you’re talking about all of the years in the decade of which means you want to make the number plural & plurals don’t use apostrophes. Apostrophes for the contracting the 20 off 2000 is needed though like *can’t* or *li’l* or *o’clock* or *mac ’n’ cheese* or *’tis* or *got ’em*.

@belstar1128

8 ай бұрын

@@gotoastal wHO CARES

@cericat

7 ай бұрын

@@belstar1128almost anyone that watched 6 hour long videos about half arsing solutions to a problem?

I worked at Best buy slinging these things to poor unsuspecting customers during this time period. You've brought up so much nostalgia with these videos. Cheers!

@SmilyTheMare

8 ай бұрын

rip to those customers i hope no one broke one of them cuz they sucked lol

@deadreaver666

8 ай бұрын

@@SmilyTheMare lol. I'm sure they're all broken

I mean, in reality the average CEO spends 99% of their time waking up at 3pm, going on wild yacht parties, then being asleep, but the laptop could have been something cool they could've showed off a few times while their secretaries did all the real computing work on an even crummier device.

CRD is my comfort creator. I love the way you talk about everything.

The reason for the U9400 was power and more important, thin & light package thermals. The U9400 was built on a 45nm process and had a TDP of 10w. Its Passmark score was a whopping 523, 1/2 of a Raspberry Pi 4. A modern Intel CPU of equivalent power consumption is the N97, built on 7nm. It has a TDP of 12w, and a Passmark score of 6000. It was *really* hard to do thin and light in 2010 :)

@eDoc2020

8 ай бұрын

A more fair comparison would be between low power and full power systems of the same time period. The SU9400 is more than half as fast as the P8700 which was super common in business laptops of the day. It's the same chip just running at a more efficient point in the frequency/voltage curve. An underclocked P8700 would have the same thermal and performance characteristics. At least they didn't use at Atom. The N270 is 175 PassMark and while it's only 2.5W TDP it's paired with a 7W 945GM chipset.

@arahman56

18 күн бұрын

I mean...e7240 was just 3 years later...the i5 4310U still holds up, and runs Windows 11 (rufus'd) just fine. And it is pretty slim (amusingly enough, you also had the e7440, which was an absolute chonker...and had the exact same specs as the e7240, lol).

IE never had any sort of API other than standard Windows controls... So my guess is that magnification mode just emulates Ctrl+ and Ctrl-, which also causes relativity in zoom: no feedback available, it just sends pulses in the void. If that theory is correct, it should work in ANY app or browser which handles zoom with Ctrl+/Ctrl-, from any modern browsers to PDF readers and a lot of other software...

@KentHambrock

8 ай бұрын

I agree. CTRL+ / CTRL- is the only thing that really makes sense.

@warpspeedscp

8 ай бұрын

What about some kind of custom activex plugin? That could do it, but then again i doubt they went to so much trouble.

@Iristallite

8 ай бұрын

It could also be emulating CTRL+Scroll Wheel!

A quick note that wireless USB was at least _available_ in 2010 on business class laptops, my Thinkpad x200 has a slot specifically for use with either wireless USB or a 4GB cache module for the hard drive (which would've been quite a trip, a bit like the short-lived 16GB Optane modules). I'm not sure if the peripherals existed at the time though.

My favorite part of the workday is halting everything when a new CRD video drops. Game development can wait, I need to find out how old laptops booted into less-than-stellar environments fast!

@revivedfears

8 ай бұрын

Wot u developing bro?

I'm kind of digging that the Z600 laptop looks like a briefcase. Edit: You know, a small ARM core could have been used for some really slick security stuff when they made this. That's what the Wii did (the code running on the Wii was just poorly made; the security concepts were really good, essentially what we have in modern devices now).

@spaghetto181

8 ай бұрын

yeah leaving the arm in standby mode all the time to check mails for example, blink a led and when you power it shows you the mail on a simple screen where you can interact quickly or just boot into windows to see the mail later in full. would've consumed less than 1W and would be way more justifiable for a machine like this.

@DEMENTO01

8 ай бұрын

tbh same as the ps4, itss southbridge has 2 ARM cpus, one to bridge the x86 cpu to the syscon and also to load encrypted boot code and another to handle I/O and background download stuff etc.

@sihamhamda47

8 ай бұрын

I wonder if those dual switchable module is implemented in modern laptops For example, if the laptop using Ryzen 7000 and Snapdragon 6xx in the same chassis. Ryzen is for main system (Windows) and the Snapdragon one is running Android

@DorperSystems

7 ай бұрын

>You know, a small ARM core could have been used for some really slick security stuff when they made this. Intel Management Engine, AMD Platform Security Processor, Sun integrated Lights Out Monitor, etc.

The wireless doc was made for sharing PowerPoint presentations in a conference room. That’s why latency doesn’t matter. ARM processor was for low power usage during flights.

@mandatorysemicolon6427

8 ай бұрын

Ah yeah, flights are the one situation where "reader" might make sense. You're cut off from the internet anyway. Well, it would, if it was on the one that booted straight to an arm core...

@cericat

7 ай бұрын

@@mandatorysemicolon6427yeah the lower draw on an 18 hour flight (I live in Australia, no matter which way I fly out of the country it's a long dead space) would definitely have been useful for skimming through stuff before sacking out for the rest of the trip. Instead you just get the worst of it, no power consumption benefit and absolutely no utility.

Montavista Linux, is appearantly also used in several musical instruments (mostly keyboard workstation synths) from the likes of Yamaha and Korg. Some Korg workstations from the early 2010’s have an intel atom cpu inside them.

@Lollllllz

8 ай бұрын

I think it's the haphazard use of space that makes it look cheap inside.

You've done such a great job picking out the bumper music played while these systems are booting up.

@DEMENTO01

8 ай бұрын

iirc thats his own music

@Just.A.T-Rex

8 ай бұрын

It’s his original work! There’s a episode with its creation featured I believe

I still have my Droid 2 R2-D2 edition. A full physical keyboard was so nice on tiny old phones from that generation.

@GoTeamScotch

8 ай бұрын

I had a Droid 1 and Droid 3 and I loved those phones. Physical keyboards were the best. Only downside is the ribbon cable was fragile between the two halves. I replaced mine on my D3 several times.

@KentHambrock

8 ай бұрын

For reference, the Droid 2 used a 1.2Ghz OMAP3640 built on a 45nm process, while the horribly underpowered OMAP3430 featured in this video ran at 600Mhz, was built on a 65nm process, and was used in the original Droid phone. It was also used in my Nokia N900, though I remember my N900 being able to do more at a significantly faster speed than this so I think Dell managed to somehow cripple the already slow processor even more. xD

Rubber reversion has been completely fixed recently. it's just more expensive so cheap tat won't use it because the method that only lasts a handful of years is cheaper and more well known.

@PaulSpades

8 ай бұрын

I have an old htc windows mobile smatphone with soft touch plastics, it still feels great, and it was well used. It's the modern stuff that gets sticky and gross.

@kaitlyn__L

8 ай бұрын

@@PaulSpadesskin oils help keep them good. It’s kind of like old cars: if used regularly it likely won’t break down. But sitting around unused is the real killer. I’ve had daily-use devices over 10 years old with good quality soft touch, but brand new things sitting around for 6 months untouched before getting used and already starting to revert.

@javaguru7141

8 ай бұрын

What's the fix? I would like to know since I might want to make use of it. I see a research paper from 2021 that mentions zinc glycerolate and zinc laurate as activators. Are those the ones you mean?

@JessicaFEREM

8 ай бұрын

@@javaguru7141 I believe so? I just know it's been fixed via another ruberization method

I think I am the intended audience for the Latitude Z. It has a few aesthetic choices that I like … sort of a dark-mode TiBook flavour, squareness everywhere, and “it has SSD” bragging rights. The scrolling feature feels like my need for a mouse with all the bells & whistles.

@whophd

8 ай бұрын

Also re: leather, I got the famous HP Spectre Folio with leather - the kind that you can’t take off, like Robocop can’t take his robotics off.

When you mentioned how slow the processor was, and that it was ARM Linux, I was scared. I’m glad to have had my fear proven wrong. I was worried they’d created a frankenprocessor that was like the Corsairs or whatever, that could be both x86 and ARM, sharing the same programmable registries, which would come at the cost of being *stupid* slow. Boy am I glad that it’s just a jumper/daughter board.

@Hugobros3

8 ай бұрын

That would be the Transmeta Crusoe, which CRD covered in a previous video about a weird japanese laptop/camera hybrid

@15:44, "I'm going to half to set up some gadgets here, just a moment..." I always love how you always unceremoniously toss cords and other things into frame whenever you say something like that.

It reminds me of IPMI modules built into servers, in a way. A totally standalone bit of hardware that could access your KVM and even do other things like control the on/off, etc. Not too useful on a laptop for this use case though, but I wonder if someone at Dell working on the PowerEdge side of things thought this was a great idea to bring to the consumer side.

@stiansoiland-reyes2548

8 ай бұрын

Great observation, and explains the console log of that firmware update, how you would do it from a PowerEdge that itself might run Linux.

I don't know why but I feel compelled to mention another use of MontaVista Linux was as the base OS in Sega's Lindbergh arcade hardware, just to offer a slightly wider array of things MontaVista Linux gets used for -- I believe those use "basically just PC" type hardware in them for the most part, x86 and all, and some of them would download new content every however often from the internet (like what every modern BEMANI/Konami arcade games and hardware do, which are weird and run Windows Embedded). Prior to this that was the only example of MontaVista usage I had personally ever seen before in my life.

That stand is actually genius. All peripherals are connected to, and routed down, to the wireless dock that sits under the desk. Now, the laptop keyboard serves as a shelf to keep all of your papers, plus, you got that extra space beneath it for even more of your papers. Also, the laptop screen seems to be at the same height level as your main monitor. As someone who works with two monitors, a laptop + peripherals on a smallish desk, im in love in that concept.

@chrism6952

8 ай бұрын

and it gets to the right temperature to possibly ignite your papers. Definitely hot enough to ruin thermal printed paper.

That simple wireless usb dock wouldve been so sweet for projectors in schools and whatnot. Really odd that it never took off.

@Aquatarkus96

8 ай бұрын

Part of me wonders if Wireless usb just doesn't work all that well in more crowded environments. Hell, "just" audio can be a pain in the wireless world.

@arjovenzia

8 ай бұрын

I Know! I had no idea such a thing even existed, I could see this being fantastically useful. Wirelessly moving from your office desk to your lounge room seems awesome! It must have sucked in practice, Chromecast isn't that great, n that's google. Looks like Dell did throw their all their mad savants at this thing, so maybe it does. I hope this gets picked back up into an 802.xx standard, seperate from but compatible with 5ghz wifi.

@immaedb

3 ай бұрын

This wasn't the last attempt at a wireless dock. Some years later WiGig docks became an option on laptops, but that didn't last long either.

This is one of my favoright series on KZread right now, very well made and in depth.

your dedication to this really oddball topic is commendable.

For absolute volume controls, a decent alternative these days is rotary encoders on fancy mechanical keyboards. Quick twist instead of mashing a button over and over

@dantevito1193

8 ай бұрын

51min ago?

@CaptainApathetic

8 ай бұрын

​@@dantevito1193probably had access before it was made public.

@shortcat

8 ай бұрын

oh, i was looking for something to emulate spinners (such as steering wheels) on mame, i wonder if these will do

@nettack

8 ай бұрын

Yes, 20 years after they collectively decided to remove the potentiometer volume wheel from laptops (did Apple "lead" the way again?), this sounds like a viable solution...

@forivall

8 ай бұрын

@@shortcat they're a lot like mouse scroll wheels, so it's just discrete steps. I don't know old mame well enough to know if that would work.

I love the the 45 degree Ethernet port. It just seems right.

@cericat

7 ай бұрын

It's one of the more sensible uses of the space since it puts it out of most potential bump hazards on a table I've dealt with.

I remember when this launched. The common thought was dell modeled it after a briefcase. It sure looks like one lol.

Thanks for the LatitudeOn video. I have a couple of old Dells with this "feature". Sorry about the sewer issue, proof once again that sh*t happens. Just became a Patreon member. How about getting your partner to step around from behind the camera sometime to say "Hi". She's doing a great job.

@glenncaughey5044

8 ай бұрын

Sewer? I heard Subaru! 😂

@nandernet

8 ай бұрын

The gradual zoom into "Look at this cat" was pro work!

This has quickly become one of my favorite series of videos on KZread. Thanks for sharing all this with us! I hope everyone is doing well and having a great day.

Do a regular dock vs usb C dock episode :) My USB C docks work ok, but there was nothing like plunking my thinkpad into its dock both at work and at home. So satisfying.

@SheepUndefined

8 ай бұрын

He's got a post on cohost about why he hates C docks, but iirc it was mostly bc they tend to disconnect at the slightest thump of yur desk

@jims_junk

8 ай бұрын

@@SheepUndefined yeah I could see that or you bump the cable and it falls out

@pdoherty926

8 ай бұрын

I still use my T430 and T430S and a ThinkDock day-to-day instead of the T14 one of my clients insisted on sending me. Replacing the ThinkDock or, god forbid, swapping docks would just be way too disruptive and I'd lose support for some of my older peripherals. So, USB-C can stay right off my desktop!

this is the most underrated channel ive seen. your the technology connections of overly complicated consumer appliances of the early 2000s. your content is amazing.

I'm really loving this series so far! Feels like such an unremembered piece of computer history. When I was young, I accidentally bumped some key on my Compaq Presario CQ57 and I remember freaking out about it booting into some weird operating system I'd never seen before. Finally figured out what that was - HP QuickWeb. It was hidden behind the F5 key with basically no indication. Bravo, HP.

@Markandpreston

Ай бұрын

Wait a fucking minute i have a cq56

When you talked about the wireless dock, my first thought was "What's the point, it's still got the charger hanging off the back". At least they thought things through a little.

Putting an ARM SoC in a laptop for quick boot and saving battery isn't a bad idea, I would love to see a constructor put a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 in a laptop, as long as they keep it accessible to mess with it. Of course, now that we have real ARM laptops with phenomenal battery life, x86 CPU with E cores that use a lot less power and smartphones / tablets so powerful that they can put to shame workstations from the 2010s using only a few watts, that's not exactly a necessity.

@Vchat20

8 ай бұрын

Hell, skip the Pi Zero and go straight to a Compute Module. That's almost begging to be turned into a solution like this. But yeah, modern laptops with efficient x86 chips and now ARM SOCs make this a moot point these days.

The sheer amount of "Oh dear god, did they really...? Yeah, they did" in this series is incredible.

So glad the algorithm recommended your channel a few days ago. Thanks for the laughs. I learned so much just listening to you rant about stuff only fellow nerds would enjoy.

36:40 Motorola Droid was such an awesome phone. If only it was able to play 480p video, I'd probably use it until 2020

@geekehUK

8 ай бұрын

Was called the Milestone over here, not that that stopped me from setting it to yell DROOOOOOOOOOOIIIIIDDDDD!!! when it booted. I loved that thing. I did everything to stretch its useful service life, overclocked to 900mhz, swap partition on the SD card, CM Froyo etc. When I did eventually upgrade, it became my sister's first smartphone.

I have to say I've used multiple laptops during that era and I never recall these "quick" start operating systems. I have seen ASUS Express Gate on the splash screen but always assumed it was some fancy name for their chipset and never gave it a second thought.

Been looking forward to the Latitude/Precision ON portion of the quick start series. My Precision M6500 had the Precision ON button, which could run all three flavors of "ON," but only if you had all two modules installed to do so. One was a flash cart with 2GB of storage for the software (which came cleaned out with my unit) and the other was some ARM SoC that I have yet to locate. Essentially the same as Latitude ON, but in a pro chassis. Oddly enough, this meant your insane investment into decked out machinery could have been for nothing, if you were using this on a daily basis. Considering it ran the same as most 13" Latitudes.

@DEMENTO01

8 ай бұрын

i really need to see this demo'd omg, having all three of them *insert meme of three cats* in one sounds so cool and weird, wonder if the arm modules are interchangable and at most all it'd need would be to be flashed with the os needed for that laptop idk

Well, that display backlight might sink 8 watts, the ti board couldn't have used more than 3-4 watts with wifi. You're probably correct about Dell ruining the linux distro with bloated cross compiled apps. Android did suck on that chip (at least versions over 2.0 slowed phones down to a crawl), but windows mobile ran fine. I don't hate it, it might have been neat if it had some filesystem access like sd card, usb or a few gigs of dedicated flash. Maybe Dell could make a modern version with a slot to stick a raspbery pi zero into their laptops.

16” displays were the bane of my repair shop in the 2010s. 15.4/15.6/17.0 were cheap, but 16 was hard to locate and pricey for no discernible reason other than fewer models using them. Awful display size; they really should make them either bigger or smaller.

In defense of the jutting out battery behind the screen: I always liked this feature on laptops (specially the old Thinkpads) because the battery could act like a handle if you were carrying the laptop open on your arm like a large artist pallete. Its a much more stable way to hold and be able to type on the machine, then balancing it on your fingers from the bottom.

@CathodeRayDude

8 ай бұрын

Oh but this one is SO BAD. I forgot to say it in the video but the battery is SO FLOPPY, it feels like it's going to snap off. No idea how they screwed that up.

@-DeScruff

8 ай бұрын

@@CathodeRayDude OH okay. Yeah that completely changes things. Dang you can't even pretend to be a busy CEO walking around "answering emails".

@PaulSpades

8 ай бұрын

@@-DeScruff "You know me. Always on the clock! Just checking if Janet set up the meeting for next week."

@kaitlyn__L

8 ай бұрын

I always found these things were loose as heck and if you jostled the battery the laptop would lose power (and your work). The idea of any of the connectors being sturdy enough to support use like you describe is kind of blowing my mind.

@CathodeRayDude

8 ай бұрын

@@kaitlyn__L oh I totally have machines I carry around by the battery regularly haha.

It would be very cool to see someone make their own module for that slot, maybe even just an inter-poser board adapting the RPi Compute module.

god i love these videos. what a golden age for content this is.

I supported piles of e6400/e6410 laptops back in the day. I remembered the logo on there, but we didn't have the cards so I never knew what they did!

I haven't seen ep1-5 so going back to look at those (thanks KZread suggestions), but what a killer idea for a series!

14:10 I had a Toshiba Satellite around 2005 (± a year) that had a hardware potentiometer for volume control. Zero lag for volume changes. It was wonderful. No laptop should be without this feature.

That (I think 1.8-inch) SSD was seen in a few other ultra portables of the era. The Thinkpad X300/301 comes to mind immediately. It think it was a sort of stop-gap before PCI-E based SSDs became more common.

@osgeld

8 ай бұрын

1.8 inch is OG ipod size, and they use a flat flex cable (had a couple netbooks that used them and yes I was able to get SSD's for them but they were PATA not SATA)

@freedomseekr

8 ай бұрын

They weren't just used in ultra portables! My current laptop is a pretty massive "gaming" thing from 2014 and it has two slots for these tiny buggers which was how, at the time, I was able to put in a 500GB SSD. Problem with mSATA was, well, most drives capped off at around 500 GB and after regular SATA SSDs slowly came down in price (while simultaneously holding more capacity) and, like you mentioned, PCIe drives became common, the format just fizzled out. I replaced the system drive in my laptop about two to three years ago and the market is just... dead.

YES. Another episode of mooking at manky laptops for an hour. As a weird laptops enjoyer, those are my favorites. BTW, That z600, looks FLIPPIN' awesome.

36:30 I had a Motorola Droid back in 2010 as well. One cool trick you could do is overclock + undervolt the CPU. My Droid ran at 1,325mhz instead of the stock ~550mhz. It was my daily driver and ran just fine at this speed. Too bad the chip in this laptop wasn't optimized in this way too. A little heatsink would probably help get there.

@DEMENTO01

8 ай бұрын

tbh the unoptimization this has is 100% software and nothing to do with hardware, also no way in hell they'd overclock this in any official capacity heatsink or not tbh. But as someone who loves overclocking these things i would love to see a custom os or a way to hack its current one and to overclock it to see how much better it could get

@kaitlyn__L

8 ай бұрын

Whoa. I messed around a little with overclocking my rooted Android in 2010, don’t think I tried undervolting though. (It was less dramatic, like 800MHz to 1000.) How was your battery life?

I really hope he’s got more series like this in the works. The quirky boot music is fab. The tongue in cheek bs is tops.

12:30 The traditional name for the problem of touch screens on any device not intended to be held in your hands when being used (like tablets and phones) is "Gorilla Arm." This effect is why, despite the fact that touchscreens have been around since about 1985, they've never really caught on for desktop or laptop computers.

Love You Ray! Hey! Could you do something for this series with windows vista sideshow? It was a little known feature that was supposed to enable a laptop to have a secondary always on screen device on the cover. That would give you quick info like widgets and calendar and stuff like that... I think only a handful of laptops had it as an option and then it died out almost immediately lol

@CathodeRayDude

8 ай бұрын

Yep, that's gonna be an episode! Maybe I'll do it next.

@Vchat20

8 ай бұрын

What a blast from the past. I remember pining for a sideshow enabled laptop at the time. Fun fact: I recall there being a homebrew app for the PSP that made it run as a sideshow display. Played with it for a short period and the novelty of the function quickly wore off after that. lol

Before watching this video I'm going to guess that there is an 80% chance you'll use that picture of two cats, considering you have two Dell laptops on your table. Please don't disappoint. 😉

@eekee6034

8 ай бұрын

There were 2 pictures of 1 cat... :)

@shrgnatlas

8 ай бұрын

@@eekee6034 40:53 😊

ABS is actually IR transparent, I had an IR receiver behind a floppy drive blank in my PC at university and it worked perfectly.

Glad to see coverage of the Latitudes' attempt at quick start and especially the Z - that's a fascinating machine for many reasons. Also, nice blue Latitude E6400 - I have the limited red one but have not been able to fidn the blue model for the life of me.

You had me until wanting to “just throw in a numpad”. That’s one of the main reasons I don’t get larger laptops. I hate how off-center it makes the whole device for keys I might touch once every quarter. So many laptops at 15" cram numpads in there instead of nicer upwards-firing speakers.

@eekee6034

8 ай бұрын

Yeah, me too.

Basically, the Latitude On module was an ARM SBC similar to an early Raspberry Pi.

You always upload these at the exact right time on friday evening to watch with my hubby :)

learning something new every CRD episode. Wonderful. thank you.

Who would watch 56 minutes of this after all the time wasted on the other videos in this series? Well... I guess I would! And plenty of others! I love the niche you have carved out for yourself, and like others, I drop what I'm doing if at all possible to watch new videos. Love ya CRD!

I loved my N900, but it did feel a little underpowered, mainly not enough RAM, given it was "real Linux" with proper multi-tasking. Nothing like missing a phone call because it took too long to swap out the active applications and pull in the phone app. I preferred it over my Nexus One because the resistive touchscreen was more accurate than the Nexus' capacitive one, the physical keyboard was much better, the screen looked sharper, and --- at the time --- I liked the apps better. But it didn't have the interest and growing ecosystem that Android did, and by 2012 Android had improved enough that it was time to switch. I do miss having a phone that ships with XTerm and root access though 😆

Perhaps the OMAP was intended, at some point, to sit in standby when "off"? The phones could typically suspend and resume in ~ under 300 mS

This remains the best-spent money in my budget. Fantastic work, sir. :)

Dell really done done it. Two of them!

"As a CEO, your primary [concern is] simply the appearance of hyper-competence and extreme wealth" I love you and your hatred of those who profit from abusing capitalism and keeping others poor. Rock on.

Such a detailed review of this old machine. Keep it up.

Honestly since I saw your video about that Riobi soldering iron I have discovered I always enjoy seeing you go through the discovey of devices/technology entombed within other devices/technology. It feels like archeology

I can't help but notice many modern machines now take longer to complete POST than to boot the OS. I don't know why booting has always been so difficult to do quickly.

@Gatorade69

8 ай бұрын

My old gaming machine in 2005 booted faster into windows XP than my current gaming computer takes to POST. I assume that's because of UEFI ? There is a quick boot option in the BIOS but I haven't tested it.

@ruthlessadmin

8 ай бұрын

@@Gatorade69 Yeah, it most certainly has to do w/ UEFI and/or Secure Boot. I have enabled the "quick boot" option in my BIOS (MSI Tomahawk) but it doesn't make much, if any difference.

@eekee6034

8 ай бұрын

It hasn't always. Get a BIOS-based machine and install an OS which doesn't touch ACPI, and booting is pretty quick. I have no experience with UEFI yet, but I'm not expecting wonders. Edit: Someone else commented about... DDR4 machines POSTing insanely slowly... if I remember the DDR version number.

@Gatorade69

8 ай бұрын

@@eekee6034 Hmm. This machine is DDR4 but I always just assumed it was UEFI. Also you haven't used a UEFI device ? How old is the computer you are using ? I think it's been standard now for a while unless you can still get motherboards without it ? I don't really care for UEFI. It's a security flaw but hey you can now use the mouse in the BIOS (oh wow, so cool).

@eekee6034

8 ай бұрын

@@Gatorade69 I was thinking as I wrote it that the computer I'm typing this on probably booted with UEFI; it's running Windows 11, but I only boot it for updates so I don't remember how long the boot itself takes. I'm usually asleep or out by the time it's finished. Same with every Windows 10 machine I've had. So yeah, I probably do have machines booting with UEFI, but I don't really know how long it takes. Also, I've been seeing how long old standards stick around for. I bought a brand new external drive last year and was astonished to find it was MBR-partitioned from the factory I've just thought, maybe UEFI machines boot slower because they check all the drives for UEFI partitions. The MBR-partitioned drive I mentioned stops one of my machines from booting. I assume the _boot firmware_ sees the MBR table and goes into BIOS mode to try to boot it. When the boot fails, maybe it's buggy enough that the switch back to UEFI fails. I imagine a slow boot could happen because the firmware switches into BIOS mode for a drive, then back into UEFI, then BIOS again for the next drive. It would be safe and cheap-to-develop to let BIOS and UEFI go through most of their initialization procedure every time they're activated, so that could take time. UEFI especially might reinitialize USB every time it's activated. Arguably, it should; what if the BIOS overwrote the RAM it was using for it? On another note, have you ever seen a 90s PC which uses the mouse and VGA graphics in the BIOS? I've seen one; it came up looking just like Windows 3.0 but you couldn't move the windows. :) It was possible for a brief period when just-about all new mice were PS2 and every PC had VGA graphics.

"Edge touch" 😏

Admitredly, now with much lower power and cooler ARM systems, a wireless laptop dock that you set a machine on for charging and hell, something like wireless USB sounds awesome. Imagine setting your Macbook Air on a stand and it's suddenly connected to your whole office setup with no wires hooked into the machine. It's not that tricky to plug a dock in, but it's still cool as hell.

@LaskyLabs

8 ай бұрын

I did not realize just how funny me mentioning ARM would be when I made this comment. Completely floored lol.

Keep the shorts coming. I am loving them.

Can't wait to know what size of laptops they shouldn't make larger or smaller this time

@elluminance

8 ай бұрын

6:08

@DiceRobo

8 ай бұрын

@@elluminance he didnt say it in the way i expected and it just glossed over my 1 lane road brain

Now I'm wondering how hard it would be to embed a RISC-V processor in an x86 motherboard to run a separate little computer off phantom USB power. Could even get Windows to talk to it like you can with ADB drivers and Android.

@hgbugalou

8 ай бұрын

Pretty much how out of band management platforms like idrac or ilo work, but usually with an arm cpu.

@thewhitefalcon8539

8 ай бұрын

PS4 has this but with ARM

@No-mq5lw

6 ай бұрын

Not difficult. The TH1520 already has most everything you want already there.

This video is a constantly unfolding parade of misery, and I cannot get enough. I want one. I want 10 of them.

Your videos are awesome! I've watched the whole series, as this video was recommended to me, and I really enjoyed it! It makes me want to bust out my own Dell laptops that have this feature and play around with it. I always wondered what it was, maybe even booted into it accidentally, but I never used it.

Love this series. Keep up the good work!

Imagine, if SSD's never became affordable and windows stayed slow, manufactures might have fully switched to desktop Linux by now.

@agy234

8 ай бұрын

2024 will surely be the year of the Linux desktop

@operator8014

8 ай бұрын

Tiny10 launches pretty decent on a 2-1/2" hdd.

@osgeld

8 ай бұрын

a full blown linux distro on spinning rust still feels exceptionally slow. Vista and 7 still take a age to boot even on NVME drives, 8 and 10 is almost impossible to wait for on a HDD, a ssd is almost required

@belstar1128

8 ай бұрын

Nah people would still tolerate it

@AlTheJuggernaut

8 ай бұрын

@@agy234 it already beat macos on steam users lmao

During my 12 years of PTSD inducing career at the Benelux Helpdesk for Dell, I can confirm that it sold very little and those SSDs were constantly failing. The sidebar Zoom function is basically just translating a held CTRL key and scroll call, so it _should_ work in modern browsers as well.

My dad used to work for Dell, so I have a decent amount of experience with Dell laptops, over the course of the last 15 years or so. _All_ of them have the 'all the weight at the back' issue, and most lift the entire front of the laptop when you try open the lid. Quickly opening most of them results in the bottom crashing back down. Edit: I actually use an E4300 still haha

That wireless stuff kind of feels like an early AirPlay & Universal Control. Wild :D

You're right that wireless charging was unusual in 2010 and not standardised, but for phones at least Palm absolutely nailed it with the Palm Pre and touchstone back then. It worked so well, and i had mine setup to become a bedside clock and calendar when i plonked it down next to my bed. You could even customise what it defaulted to showing when docked on touchstones in different locations.

I dig the hair. From where it’s at now I’d give it an undercut and let the rest grow a bit more. Of course, I’d also lighten bits of it or add color, so no sense listening to me 😂

Cool video! In 2010, I was just starting as an independent consultant after working in various corporate IT milieux for just under 25 years, and until I saw your video, I had never heard of this laptop. After watching, I think what we're looking at here is what amounts to a showcase laptop, kind of like a concept car, except that in this case, you could actually buy it. Theoretically, anyway. I suspect that Dell mostly made it to wow corporate IT people with whiz-bang features, some of which were available in the laptops they would actually buy, and some of which were intended to show off technology still in the pipeline (like the wireless charging, maybe) but weren't yet ready for prime time. I don't think this laptop was really intended for CEOs. As much fun as it is to poke fun at CEOs, I can tell you a few things from the years I spent supporting them. One is that in 2010, a lot of them still didn't have PCs on their desks; many had little-used ones on their credenzas, but most of them didn't carry laptops. The smart ones (yeah, I know, smart CEO, oxymoron, right?) didn't feel a need to tote around the latest and greatest technology just for the purpose of showing off. Any tech products they did carry was there to help them do their jobs better, not because they wanted to be billboards for Dell or Lenovo or Apple or whatever. I can also tell you that CEOs, and other corporate executives, are busy people who don't appreciate time wasters, and they hate insults to their intelligence. This laptop would have done both, and anyone issuing such a laptop to executives would at least have been reprimanded, if not fired outright. Execs in big companies make requests of their IT departments on a regular basis, but they depend on those IT departments to make sure that whatever tech is used in the company delivers what's needed from it. They don't run into the IT department head's office waving a flashy add for a new laptop and say "Get this for me!" Given what you said about how few of them you found, I'm thinking that, as you said in the video, most of them were review units - reviewed by corporate IT folks as well as trade rag writers - and promptly sent back because of all the drawbacks you reported. 3:03, 2GB soldered-on, non-upgradeable RAM - Actually, one of the problems with laptops that came out in the Windows Vista era was that few computers that used the DDR2 RAM of the time could support more than 2GB of it, but I found Vista to be sluggish in anything less than 3GB. That said, this would be a late model for DDR2 RAM, and most computers supporting DDR3 were upgradeable to at least 8GB, so this does seem to be a strange design choice. 7:15, boot times - In my experience, Windows Vista never boots on a production machine, with everything the way a typical user would use it, in less than about 2 minutes. That was the whole reason why companies explored alternate boot technologies like L-On. 8:20, Micro SATA - When SSDs first started appearing in production computers, IT folks (like me) didn't pay much attention to them, because no matter how much faster they could operate internally than a conventional HDD, they necessarily had to be hobbled by the SATA bus, which only supported up to 3Gb/sec. It's true that no unadorned, spinning HDD ever delivered anything close to that kind of throughput, but given the price of SSDs at the time, we didn't expect them to deliver enough of a performance boost to justify the expense. My guess is that Micro SATA was supposed to at least look like it was supposed to address that issue, although I don't know enough about it to know if it does. (I do know that mSATA doesn't, and M.2 SATA/NGFF doesn't improve things much, if at all.) Wireless dock - OK, that blew me away. I have clients how who would kill for a wireless dock, as long as the technology actually worked reliably. That's the problem I've always had with USB hubs and even USB-C docks: there are just some things that don't work well with them. Lack of numeric keypad (sorry, couldn't find the time index) - Yeah, that would've been nice, but as I recall, numeric keypads didn't become common on 15.6" laptops until several years after this one was released.

That's actually an incredibly cool idea, and with how far technology has progressed since these were made, I would not mind seeing this make a resurgence. I mean yeah, it might be confusing for end users, but just think. What I wouldn't give to have a Pi CM4 or Rockchip or similar in my gaming laptop that I could just switch to and get an extra six hours of battery when I didn't need to do anything fancy. There are some damn good ARM SoCs on the market right now -- the RK3588, for example, has a 12 watt TDP and can comfortably emulate a Switch -- and hooking one of those up to a decent screen and 90Wh battery could make for a really solid product.

I was watching Futurama when I got this notification. Absolutely perfect timing

A Turbo XT booting into MS-DOS 3 off an MFM hard drive takes ~47 seconds. Yeah, sure, you couldn't hibernate or put it to sleep in 1987, but you could lock the keylock on the case and turn the monitor off to have a "hot start" and be on in less than ten seconds. The fact that boot times and the general solutions to boot times are pretty much exactly the same then as they are now really proves that it's not really severe enough a problem to stick the 2010's equivalent of a Chromebook inside a laptop.

Thank you for episode numbers!