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21st April 2017
I impulse bought a Dell Latitude X200 laptop from eBay. I decided to embark on this refurbishment project back in February 2017 when I spotted a great YouTube video about running modern software on Windows 98 using KernelEx.
Photo of Dell Latitude X200 connected to external lightscribe DVD burner
My first step was to swap out the 30GB PATA hard drive with a 120GB replacement because this is the maximum size Windows 2000 or XP supports for C:\ drive before you have to start create a separate D:\ partition. The machine also comes with 128MB RAM onboard and I have installed the maximum supported 512MB RAM into the expansion slot, giving me the maximum supported 640MB in total.
As the laptop's onboard wireless adapter only supports the wireless-b WiFi standard I have also picked up a cheap wireless-g expansion card so it can still connect to access points and take advantage of modern broadband speeds.
I noticed quickly that the laptop struggles to hold a charge, leaving battery life at a paltry 45 minutes. This is a common problem with old laptops, but I was genuinely surprised to find a Chinese manufacturer that still made modern reproduction batteries for this model at a viable price. It works a treat and the laptop now lasts around 4 or 5 hours between charges during normal operation.
Finally I was glad to see Dell opted to future-proof the X200 by dropping PS/2 ports in favour of USB, so my emergency "ye olde" peripherals weren't needed and I could make use of an old 1TB external HDD I still have to copy large downloads across.
While I initially wanted the laptop to run Windows XP so I could play old games on it I (annoyingly) couldn't get it to contact Microsoft's activation servers, and the usual steps to bypass the check would not work after the community-supported Service Pack 4 was installed. I suspect when I try to install this again I will stop at Service Pack 3 for that very reason.
I managed to upgrade the system BIOS and the firmware for a number of devices using Dell's downloadable tools. However when the system suddenly refused to let me login even in safe mode a week later because of the activation problem, I gave up on that particular plan and decided to install Xubuntu 16.04 LTS instead.
Screenshot of XFCE desktop running on Dell Latitude X200
Surprisingly it actually worked very well and the installer recognised the hardware configuration immediately. Hard drive encryption was successful and common packages like LibreOffice, Scribus, the GNU Image Manipulation Program, Inkscape, VLC and even some 2D games I tried operated correctly and were still usable and responsive while multitasking.
The only real limitation I ran into was limited web browser support. The 933MHz Pentium III processor this laptop uses does not support SSE instructions, so the only way to surf the modern web is with NetSurf or a very old version of Firefox I installed through Winetricks.
Also, since installing Linux I cannot get either the onboard WiFi chip or the Netgear WiFi expansion card to connect to any access points, so I have only been able to use ethernet for network connectivity. I think this is a driver or configuration issue because grub refuses to even load if the expansion card is inserted when I power on the machine.
You can read more about the tools and technologies I talked about in this blog post at these links:
https://www.dell.com/downloads/ca/rpg/x200_spec.pdf
https://www.dell.com/support/home/us/en/04/product-support/product/latitude-x200/drivers
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_ATA
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11
http://kernelex.sourceforge.net/
