Great looking machine!
My Dell XPS L502 has recently retired from service (used it for work and its been faultless) other than the battery is knackered. The battery was pretty rubbish from day one and lasted for about 2 hours!
I'll try and find a battery replacement. Other than that, the screen and chassis is in excellent condition. I am going to give it a good service and install XP or revert back to Windows 7 for retro gaming!
Just out of interest, why have you reverted to XP over Windows 98?
Surprisingly I still get around an hour of gaming on this 8100! Will test it with Unreal tournament tomorrow maybe.
As to why I wanted to try XP, quite a long story. I'll try to summarise
I was interested to know if the it was better driver wise because it was designed for XP in the first place. Some PCMCIA cards which would give it much better audio (Soundblaster Audigy 2 ZS) as they have working drivers for XP and 2000 but not Windows 98.
I could then maybe run some older games in compatibility mode whilst using the Soundblaster DOS emulated drivers. Either that or DOSbox, but that defeats the purpose of a retro machines.
My ideal machine would be a slimmer 8100 with much better audio like OPL3 FM that has native DOS support.
Most of these cards are for older ISA desktops.
The crappy ESS audio cards on most ~2002 laptops break dos support on W98.
Older laptops from the mid 90s do have better dos audio, but then they have other problems like terrible TFT screens and much lower specs so unable to run some of the retro games I was playing. The 8100 is perfect from late 90s to mid 2000s.
I wanted to try an older PCMCIA card like a Roland SCP-55, however these are like rocking horse poo and when they do come up for sale go for crazy money - £300+ They are also not perfect and would need some fiddling with drivers I expect.
I could get a Serdaco OPL3LPT but this is for OPL3 music only, plus you need to patch every game.
As soon as XP (SP3) was installed, it was slower to boot up and the games I tested (Duke 3D and a couple others) didnt run at all. The OS then froze, so yeh, XP is just like I remembered it. Dogcrap
W98 SE is back on and installed after a fresh format of XP!
Fast, low disk space and most things ive tried so far work fine.
It doesnt give DOS support but im going to try the Yamaha S-YXG100plus SoftSynth again tomorrow. You can set this instead of general midi and when using Windows apps it sounds 1000x better. It does have lag though but for music in something like Doom 95, its great