Well, I've expanded my retro kit to include my first laptop but it's been an adventure.
I was browsing laptops within 20 miles of home on eBay and came across a nice looking (aesthetically) laptop "for cheap", that turns out is a Dell XPS M1530. My interest was cemented when I saw it had dedicated graphics - an 8600GT. It was £50 and spares and repairs without the hard drive but with the charger, and a laptop bag. It was about 5 minutes away so it was worth a look.
I message about the laptop asking is it S&R because the HDD has been removed or does it actually not work - it comes with the charger so does it at least fire up if you try it today. The seller (writing very well) said "worked when last used ages ago". Over a few messages (local collection wasn't offered on the ad) I gave her the benefit of the doubt because of how she and the advert came across and paid £50 for it. She then provided her address as about 40 minutes away not 5 minutes! Quite annoying but not too far away still.
Get it home and it does not turn on at all - nothing. No LEDs lighting up. I take it all apart to see if there is anything fishy and change the CMOS battery whilst I was in there (literally need to remove everything to get to it) and clean it out and give it new thermal paste whilst I was digging... Still no boot.
I could only think it was a dead motherboard or dead charger, so I bought a new charger on eBay for £10 and 3 days later it is here... and... it boots up! Keyboard doesn't work but I've re-seated the zero insertion force (probably my least favourite thing about working on laptops) cable and the keyboard is working fine.
It's got:
45nm T8100 2.1GHz / 800FSB / 4mb / 2c2t
3GB RAM
8600GT 256MB
720p display 15.6"
wifi + bluetooth + a space for a sim card?
XP and Vista (official) support.
The 800MHz FSB limits me to some quite slow (and expensive) CPUs annoyingly. I could spend £15 upgrading to 2.4GHz with the same 4mb cache for about £15, any faster and the prices jump to about £40. I'll be dropping in an SSD,
obviously, and probably swap the 1GB stick for a 2GB for 4GB total.
Some of the glued plastic is starting to peel away on the upper palm rest so I'll glue that back down.
The question is, do I go XP for the "performance", Vista for the "lulz" or Windows 7 for almost genuine usability?