Wow...

So I went to another sale the other day and, once again, didn't get exactly what I was after so I took my frustration out on the quintessential pile of broken laptops... by buying eight of them.

One that had caught my eye turned out to be a really good deal. It was $20 Inspiron 8200 and said the display didn't work, but would show an image on an external monitor. Cocky as I am (when I have a cache of Dell parts), I knew I'd be able to make it play nice so I snapped it up. Well, it and three other Dells ($1 each for a broken Latitude C840, Inspiron 4150 and Inspiron 5000).

As I was making my way through the line, I saw a docking station and power supply sitting on a cart. I checked the price and noticed they were $20. Checking the item number showed they were both included with my Inspiron 8200 purchase. Sweet bonus as the dock was the smaller one. I didn't have one of those.

Upon arriving home, I took the 8200 apart to find out what the deal was. The video board wasn't sitting straight so I suspected that to be the problem. With a reseat of that and the display connector (which looked more elegant than usual, I put a near-comatose battery in an started the system. I noticed that the display had a yellowish look to it while off, as well as a more glossy appearance. This was unique. I wondered what Setup would have to say about it.

Then the panel started up. I was outdoors when it happened so the difference wasn't as dramatic as it would later prove to be. In setup, I saw that the system had a 32MB Geforce4 440 Go GPU and the display was listed as UXGA Ultrasharp. Ultrasharp, eh? That's what my desktop LCD is. I thought it was some slight improvement that Dell played the marketing game with, but when I went inside and started the system again, I saw it was no ordinary notebook LCD. Additionally, UXGA isn't a common display resolution for a laptop.

When the panel was on and black, I had to look closely to see whether the backlight was even on. O RLY? Usually, I would see a horizontal band of darkness with grey at top and bottom when the screen was painted black and each eye would see a different image due to viewing angle problems. Not this time. What was going on here?

It turned out that this display was an expensive option on some of the systems which shared the same chassis, mostly because of the M50 workstation model. It was intended for the graphical design market. I will say this: It's the best laptop computer display I have ever seen. It's more bright than the display on my Alienware M9700, has the same apparent black level despite the extra brightness, and has colors that are way more rich. For a five year-old system, that's truly impressive.

My only wish is that this display was in a faster computer. The Pentium 4-M is not my favorite CPU by any stretch of the imagination, but I'd sooner have a Pentium 4 than a Pentium III. I'd rather, however, have a Pentium M.

I had to move the entire upper display assembly from the Inspiron 8200 to the $1 Latitude C840 since the 8200's fixed optical drive bay wasn't working. The casing doesn't match so I will have to change it over to the Latitude display casing. That will be where I will really have to be careful. Combining the two systems, I ended up with the following:

Dell Latitude C840:

Pentium 4 1.8GHz
1GB RAM (came with the $1 system)
30GB hard disk (came in the Inspiron)
Geforce4 440 Go 32MB
15" Ultrasharp UXGA LCD
24/24/10x CD-RW/DVD fixed bay drive
floppy drive module


Dell Inspiron 8200

Pentium 4 1.6GHz
256MB RAM
no hard disk
Geforce4 440 Go 32MB
15" UXGA LCD
24/10/10x CD-RW/DVD fixed bay drive
floppy drive module

While I was at the sale, I also picked up a stripped Dell desktop that still had the CPU in it. Yes, it was a Pentium 4, but it wasn't for me. It was for my wife. She was running a 2GHz Pentium 4 with the old 400MHz frontside bus. The chip from the stripped rig? 3GHz with an 800MHz frontside bus and Hyperthreading support. 50% better from the start, in addition to letting dual-channel RAM make a difference at long last and allowing her to play videos on her system while loading it down with other work due to Hyperthreading making the system think it has two CPUs. It really improved her World of Warcraft experience.