I’d investigate that ethernet port.
Also look into its bios and see if theres any bios mods out there. Is it an H2O based laptop or does it have something nice like AMI? (american megatrends)
You can probably depend on the 2 USB slots on the far side because thats a pretty wide ribbon cable, I’d expect them to have their own lines, but just be careful.
Boot
Well even if its not gigabit, try it it’ll probably still be faster. You basically have a folding northwood computer. Think of it that way.
Not gigabit…just fast e… 10/100… Well was a thought. Thought I’d offer…LOL I need to clear out some junk… and a few PC’s
I might take that ram, don’t think I can use the PC tho.
Ok lemme know.
This might be a good study in just how much life you can get out of ancient ancient hardware with some really modern and optimized software. Most people would be surprised – I converted a bunch of old laptops and desktops like this to basic machines for word processing, dictionary, thesaurus and wikipedia clients (no real web clients – too slow) and it worked shockinlgy well on PIII and P4 class machines with 2-4gb ram.
Was fine for gradeschool/elementary students and just limited enough to keep them from being tempted by games.
Yup! Even amiga’s can still have modern functions. Just what effort is put where to get what, when
So by PLA you mean the RAM module itself? That would be SO-DIMM (Small Outline - Dual In-line Memory Module) here, where normal DIMMs are the desktop size, and SIMM (Single In-line Memory Module) are from back when the pins on front and back of the stick were the same.
Oh, you were referring to a different thread?
Being able to buy a user-replaceable battery? Truly that is luxury. 
I am having a bit of trouble understanding here — so you are planning on using an active PATA-SATA adapter for the Dell B130 you mentioned as limited to a PATA (IDE) interface?
When I looked around, all of those were from seemingly fly-by-night PRC (mainland China) manufacturers; which I was unwilling to trust. So was my passive PATA-CF adapter, but I am less concerned when there are no chips involved at all.
Happy to hear it is useful; though keep in mind I am no expert, I just had some latent curiosity and your question gave me an excuse to spend some some time looking into it.
Again, I don’t really know yet. I’ll be buying a shitload of them to test all sorts. This is just a start.
Passive would be better, yeah, but with msata thats a bit difficult on an IDE bus lol.
Still it saves me effort lol
and yeah I know I need a new summary its bothering the shit outta me. I’ll probably attack all of these posts tbh and reformat a whole crap load of stuff. Its literally been years since I managed a post like this.
Hmm, that reminds me, I have not updated my COSPAR Launch List thread in few days…
Anyway, godspeed on your project, and if you find any good brand name adapters or reasonably priced ATA protocol drives (PATA or CF), do tell.
Check in later, there’ll be a post for it
How old should I go? I am thinking about pentium 3 laptops @ 1GHz and up.
Work post 6/14/2021
Looks like the processor I can get right now is a 778.
That’ll be 2.13 to start, but I think theres some magic hiding that I can pull out. Its a 7.5w processor, so I’ll be interested to see where I end up.
Later in the night. Doing some temperature tests. I have a temp lead hooked up to my desktop motherboard and the resistor is hanging in front of the cooler’s exhaust inside of my B130. Hottest air output so far has been 55, so its probably hit its cieling for sure. Right now I’m just building random packages in XBPS but I am more than likely going to flip over to windows on another hard drive and start testing stuff with that. This whole rigging I’ve done is actually excellent. I wish I had a better temp lead or a smaller one I could put INSIDE the B130 block, but I don’t care right now, honestly. I mostly just want to see how hot the air coming out is.
In my few tests so far, HWINFO has reported this back
AVG: 38C
HI: 55C
LO: 31C
and I do believe the probe is touching the cooler, so it should be relatively accurate, I think.
More stuff later
Buh, took a nap, had a shits worth dab, just kinda eh.
Looked at this drive, surprised its a 5400RPM drive. I’m half tempted to put the B130 stuff on hold until my SSD board gets here because I don’t have anything else rn to use. Bunch of 20GB disks, so unless theres a drive array I could hook up to this thing I think I’m shit outta luck.
At least till my ebay order gets here. Oh, speaking of, I went ahead and ordered a new b130 battery. I can’t trust what I’m reading, and I am curious to know if a new battery will also read at 75% capacity. With that, I’m still looking for low power processors, but the only one I can really find is a 778. I mean… I’ll take it, it’ll be the best out of the box performer, and with some effort, I can push it past just 2.13ghz, no problem. I think. Theres pin diagrams around on the net somewhere showing all the possible voltages you can pinmod in, its like a weird adding system, and if done right you get a lot out of it.
Honestly if I just get the same performance at half the power consumption I’ll be happy lol.
You know I’m thinking about it… I’m not like… benchmarking stuff on these drives, honestly. I’ll throw this slow ass drive in and get windows running. I was gunna do 2000 server, but maybe I’ll do XP. Just for laughs, old memories.
Need to look at all what NHC can do. Seems like a handy toolset to have in linux.
6/15/21
Ugh, two days before my big thing, sink’s got a big thing today.
Fuck. Lots happening.
Alright so I’m thinking I’m going to clean up house some more and moke a better workspace for all this shit. This might be on hold for a little while.
6/16/21
Gunna do shit in a few hours for workspace, but I woke up and had a bit of an epiphany. I had a celeron m once, and gamed on it! I should try some of those.
Managed to find a 735A lying around. Its got a bunch of fucked up pins and a mouse poop stuck in it tho, so I threw it out xD was on the floor in the attic. I’m not quite sure how it got there unless a mouse carried it.
Big stuff happening tomorrow, so not sure if I’ll post anything. Work posts are pretty much going to be like this and I’m going to just edit shit in, and when someone posts I’ll make a new post after theirs, esp if broken off into convo. Then, if someone else, or many ppl want to do this project with me, they can follow similar format and stuff doesn’t get crazy messy.
Seems the 1300 is the mainline of the B130/120. News to me, but good to know. The price difference is kinda stupid though.
6/17/21
Endocrinologist appt today. Kinda scared.
I have my work area sorta set up now. I have all the machines I want to work with in the same space, and I am working on setting up stuff to be able to stream when I am working on stuff on the reg again. Right now things are a little bit sporadic.
I’m going to see if I can buy like a bin of random pentium M’s from china and see if I get lucky. I can see like one 778 on ebay, no 753’s anywhere, which are the chips I’m interested in the most. So… fuck. I’ll have to dig a bit.
However the more I think about those celeron M’s the more I think about the celeron 300A. That thing didn’t suck that much, and I even had a pentum 4 based celeron that ran at 2.4, that thing was actually sick. So I might take a look at what there is on that end.
Still thinking about yonah chips tho. If I can find an X50 engineering chip I might be able to do some stuff to get yonah on older chipsets, but I’d have to get lucky. I’ve only seen 2 on other forum threads being like “Look what I bought from someone at intel lol”
Appt was fine, I was scared of nothing. 6 week wait tho, maybe I can get things done early and get to things faster tho.
Shakey.
Going to keep working on my workspace before I rly attack this anymore. I want Koga set up to at least play with because I suspect the 925XE chipset and the 915 are somewhat related. So I’ll be playing with that some, and seeing if theres some PM to P4 sorta deals that will let me play with the board more. @Fouquin happen to know of anything?
I might give enough of a shit about W11 to try it for this project literally just because of the startup sound.
6/18/21
Ok first drive enclosure in. Its the first msata enclosure matched with the first msata drive, obv.
Found a pata drive bridge, gunna swap drives. Oh god the system is trying to wake up from deep sleep state. Quick hitting my msata disk with /dev/zero then I’m gunna dump my disk into it. It’ll be nice to have the ability to upgrade storage now if I need to, but just to have full disk speed will be… ugh, pleasent. Firefox won’t take 18 seconds to open. I’ve timed it, its just a pentium m thing.
The controller in my pata bridge is freaking out. Its never been able to write this fast before lol.
Been a while, still waiting for it to finish the dump.
… ok the dump finished but void apparently can’t be drive dumped.
Welp… But it boots and the drive picks up. So… Goals? idk.
Going to grab the files I need off the other drive then and go find a cd drive caddy I like.
I managed to break the barely bulged cap off of the board, so I threw it in the oven. This is not going to be the recommended board. I now see why there is a cover on it.
New work post 6/18/21
I baked the pcb. I forgot I could do that, somehow. Waiting for it to cool.
Since cloning the drive didn’t just work I’ve been thinking about what OS’s I actually want to run on the B130, both for testing things but also for machine management. I’m going to look into W10AME for machine management on stuff like this and see if I can get some bullshit optimized. I looked it up, this thing can get to 4GB ram, and it can run W10 after an update via windows 7. So I’ll be going thru a bit.
I’m also going to see about making a micro version of W2000 to run side by side with another operating system. Was reading some shit about how the PM works and what all cool whacky shit they put in it. It can do a lot of stuff, so I’m looking forward to that.
As for right now I am thinking about linux and windows choices. For reasons, I am going to install kali linux. TBH, I am getting that USB 3.0 / wifi N card and I’m gunna wanna play with it. I’m also looking at Mageia as they have a solid 32bit community. Might be worth it. I might be stuck on void for now though, at least until I find something more raw and controllable.
Have not started coreboot research at all. Need to do that soon.
Found a win 7 x86 image. Going to try to install windows on the machine tonight, get onto 10 and get its machine key upgraded from XP.
Going to see if I can get a post moved
just found a power off loop in the dell bios. gr8. Def need coreboot on this.
Uh. Actually I think that hard drive just died on me. Literally.
Baking the SSD PCB worked, it booted, so I’m just gunna say fuck it and call it a day with that one.
DVD’s aren’t working. Will have to try something else later.
6/19/21
Put a slot load drive from an imac G5 in it, works, damn drive has 10MB cache. Handy. Still gunna get a caddy though.
Reserved Windows Key Upgrade Guide
@SgtAwesomesauce @wendell can this post be moved up above the storage solutions post?
Maybe wendell / sgt can but mods cant re arrange posts, you can always just splice it into another post (edit it and add it to the bottom or top) it doesn’t have to be a separate post
Probably better to flag as something else tho so we dont have to clean up these responses later
kk not a mod so I don’t have that panel lol
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Hi man, I have inspiron B130 too and wanna do retro gaming on it. Wanna pinmod my Celeron M from 1.5ghz to 2.0ghz. And wanna install more than 2gb of ram. Is it possible to install up to 4gb of ram ? If yes, how ?!? Please help…
I’m still perusing your 2021 essay, having stumbled over it just now…in 2024.
I attempted and succeeded with MANY of these, and much more, with a D800 (doing it again with an E6420) and help if possible…three years out.